🎬 YouTube Transcript to PDF Generator

Turn any YouTube video into a beautifully formatted PDF in seconds — no API keys, no manual copy-pasting, no hassle.

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💡 Why You Need This

You've watched a brilliant YouTube tutorial. A masterclass. A 2-hour deep dive. And now... it's gone. You can't search it. You can't highlight it. You can't read it on a plane.

YouTube transcripts exist — but they're buried, ugly, and impossible to use.

This Actor fixes that. Paste any YouTube URL, get a clean, professional PDF with the full transcript, cover page, video metadata, and thumbnail. Ready to read, share, archive, or feed into your AI workflows.

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✨ What Makes This Different

Feature	This Actor	Manual Copy-Paste	Other Tools
Professional PDF with cover page	✅	❌	❌
Video thumbnail + metadata	✅	❌	❌
Batch process multiple videos	✅	❌	❌
Removes [Music] [Applause] noise	✅	❌	❌
Clean justified paragraphs	✅	❌	❌
Optional timestamps per line	✅	❌	Rarely
No API key required	✅	✅	❌
Works on any public video	✅	✅	Sometimes

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🚀 Use Cases

📚 Students & Researchers Convert lecture videos, TED talks, and educational content into study material you can annotate, highlight, and search.

✍️ Content Creators Repurpose competitor content analysis, transcribe your own videos for blog posts, or extract scripts for editing.

🏢 Businesses & Teams Archive webinars, training videos, and conference talks as searchable PDF documents for your knowledge base.

🤖 AI & Automation Workflows Feed clean transcripts into ChatGPT, Claude, or your RAG pipeline. PDFs are already formatted — no preprocessing needed.

📰 Journalists & Writers Transcribe interviews, press conferences, and source material instantly. No more replaying the same 30-second clip.

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📄 What the PDF Looks Like

Every generated PDF includes:

• Cover page with video thumbnail, title, channel name, duration, view count, and publish date
• Clean transcript merged into readable justified paragraphs (no more one-word lines)
• Optional timestamps [MM:SS] if you need to reference back to the video
• Page numbers on every page
• Professional typography using Helvetica with proper line spacing

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⚡ How to Use

1. Basic — Single Video

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUR_VIDEO_ID"],
  "language": "en",
  "includeMetadata": true,
  "cleanTranscript": true
}

2. Batch — Multiple Videos at Once

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_1",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_2",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_3"
  ],
  "language": "en"
}

3. With Timestamps (great for reference material)

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUR_VIDEO_ID"],
  "includeTimestamps": true
}

4. Non-English Video

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUR_VIDEO_ID"],
  "language": "hi"
}

Supports any language YouTube provides captions for — en, hi, es, fr, de, ja, pt, ar, and more.

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📥 Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
urls	Array	Required	One or more YouTube video URLs
language	String	en	Preferred caption language code
includeTimestamps	Boolean	false	Add [MM:SS] timestamps to each line
includeMetadata	Boolean	true	Cover page with thumbnail and video info
cleanTranscript	Boolean	true	Remove [Music] [Applause] annotations
proxyConfiguration	Object	optional	Proxy settings (required for cloud runs)

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📤 Output

Dataset (one row per video)

{
  "status": "success",
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
  "channelName": "Rick Astley",
  "durationFormatted": "3m 33s",
  "wordCount": 412,
  "segmentCount": 87,
  "language": "en",
  "pdfKey": "transcript_dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "filename": "Rick_Astley_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up_dQw4w9WgXcQ.pdf",
  "processedAt": "2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Key-Value Store

Each PDF is saved as transcript_{videoId} with content type application/pdf. Click the key in your run's Storage tab to download instantly.

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⚙️ Proxy Configuration

YouTube blocks requests from cloud provider IPs (AWS, GCP, Azure). A residential proxy routes requests through a real home IP address to bypass this.

Recommended: Use Apify Residential Proxy — select it from the proxy picker in the input form. Each user is charged for their own proxy usage independently.

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❓ FAQ

Q: Does it work on videos without manual captions? Yes. It automatically falls back to YouTube's auto-generated captions if manual captions aren't available.

Q: What languages are supported? Any language that YouTube provides captions for. Pass the ISO language code in the language field (e.g. hi for Hindi, es for Spanish).

Q: Can I process an entire YouTube playlist? Pass multiple URLs in the urls array. For full playlist support, combine this Actor with a YouTube playlist scraper to extract all video URLs first.

Q: Why is the video title showing as "YouTube Video (ID)"? The proxy may not be configured. Metadata fetching requires a proxy on cloud runs. Enable Apify Residential Proxy in the input.

Q: How long does it take? Most videos process in 5–15 seconds. Longer videos (1+ hour) may take up to 30 seconds.

Q: What happens if a video has no captions? The Actor logs a clear error for that video and continues processing the rest. It never crashes on a single failure.

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📊 Performance

• ⚡ Average processing time: 8 seconds per video
• 📄 Average PDF size: 150–400 KB
• 🔢 Tested on videos up to 4 hours long
• 🌍 Tested with 15+ languages
• ✅ Success rate: 95%+ on videos with captions enabled

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💬 Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Issues tab on this Actor's page. Responses within 24 hours.

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Stop watching videos twice. Get the transcript, get the PDF, get on with your work.