YouTube Transcript Scraper — Bulk Video Transcripts to Text, No API Key

Extract YouTube transcripts in bulk — plain text plus timestamped segments — from videos, channels and playlists. No login, no API key, no quota. A faster, cheaper alternative to the YouTube Data API for transcript data.

Quick start

1. Fill in the input — set the fields in the input tab (prefilled with a working example).
2. Click Start — the Actor runs and writes one record per item to the dataset.
3. Get your data — export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it via the API.

What you get

• Full transcript as plain text and as timestamped segments (start, duration, text)
• Video title, channelName, language, isAutoGenerated, durationSeconds
• Output in JSON, text or SRT
• Works on single videos, whole channels and playlists
• Videos without captions are flagged (status: "no_captions") and not charged

Example

Input

{ "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"], "languages": ["en"], "format": "json" }

Output

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Example video",
  "channelName": "Example channel",
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "durationSeconds": 212,
  "segments": [{ "start": 0.0, "duration": 3.2, "text": "We're no strangers to love" }],
  "text": "We're no strangers to love ...",
  "status": "ok",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-07T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Content repurposing — turn videos into blog posts, summaries and newsletters.
• AI & RAG pipelines — feed clean transcripts into LLMs, vector databases and search.
• Research & analysis — search across hundreds of videos at once.

YouTube Data API alternative

No API key, no OAuth, no daily quota. Paste URLs and get transcripts — including auto-generated captions the official API does not expose as text.

Pricing

$10 per 1,000 transcripts ($0.01 each). You are only charged for transcripts actually delivered — videos without captions cost nothing.

FAQ

Does it need a YouTube API key? No. No key, no login, no quota. Can it do a whole channel or playlist? Yes — pass a channel or playlist URL and set maxVideos. Which languages? Any available caption track; set languages in priority order (default ["en"]). Auto-generated captions? Yes, and each record flags isAutoGenerated. What formats? json, text or srt.

Settings

• urls — videos, channels or playlists.
• languages — caption languages in priority order (default ["en"]).
• includeTimestamps, format (json/text/srt), maxVideos.

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Example output

{
  "videoId": "arj7oStGLkU",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU",
  "success": true,
  "title": "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED",
  "author": "TED",
  "language": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "transcript": "So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might…",
  "…": "…"
}