Youtube Transcript Scraper

High-performance YouTube transcript scraper to fetch video transcripts, metadata, and channel content without an API key.

Extract full transcripts, video metadata, and channel listings from YouTube with ease. Supports multiple languages, automatic fallback logic, and highconcurrency scraping.

What can YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

• ✅ Extract Transcripts - Get full text with timestamps in any available language.
• ✅ Video Metadata - Scrape titles, descriptions, upload dates, and channel info.
• ✅ Channel Crawling - Automatically discover and scrape all videos from a channel.
• ✅ Multi-language Support - Specify your preferred language (e.g., 'en', 'es', 'fr').
• ✅ No API Key Required - Works directly with the YouTube website.
• ✅ Export formats - JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML.

Why scrape YouTube data?

YouTube contains a wealth of operational and content data valuable for:

• 🎯 Content Analysis - Analyze trends, keywords, and topics across thousands of videos.
• 📊 Sentiment Analysis - Process transcripts to understand viewer sentiment and feedback.
• 📍 SEO Research - Optimize your own content by analyzing top-performing videos.
• 📚 Educational Archives - Create searchable databases of lecture or tutorial transcripts.

What data can you extract from YouTube?

Data Field	Description	Example
title	Video title	"How to Code in 2026"
videoId	Unique YouTube ID	"jNQXAC9IVRw"
channelName	Name of the uploader	"TechDaily"
fullTranscript	Complete text of the video	"Hello everyone, welcome back..."
transcript	Array of segments with timestamps	[{"start": 0, "text": "Hello"}]
views	View count (where available)	"1,023,450 views"

How to scrape YouTube data

1. Click "Try for free" to start using this Actor.
2. Enter your input - Add video URLs or channel URLs.
3. Configure options - Select preferred language and max items.
4. Start the scraper - Click the "Start" button.
5. Download results - Export your data in JSON, CSV, or Excel format.

Input

Detailed input configuration is available in the Input tab.

Key settings:

• startUrls: List of Video or Channel URLs to scrape.
• language: Preferred transcript language code (default: 'en').
• maxVideosPerChannel: Limit the number of videos scraped per channel.
• proxyConfiguration: Recommended to use residential proxies for high volume.

Output

You can download data in multiple formats:

• JSON - For developers and API integrations.
• CSV - For simpler analysis in spreadsheets.
• Excel - Ready-to-use spreadsheet format.

Output example

{
  "title": "Amazing Video Title",
  "videoId": "abc12345",
  "channelName": "Channel Name",
  "uploadDate": "2025-01-01",
  "transcriptFound": true,
  "transcriptLanguage": "en",
  "fullTranscript": "This is the full text of the video content...",
  "transcript": [
    {
      "start": 0,
      "duration": 5.2,
      "text": "This is the first sentence."
    }
  ]
}

How much does it cost to scrape YouTube?

Pricing Model: Pay-Per-Event (PPE)

• Initialization: $0.00005 per run (includes 5s compute).
• Per Transcript: $0.0028 per video scraped.

Cost estimates:

• 100 videos: ~$0.28
• 1,000 videos: ~$2.80

Tips to reduce costs:

• Use specific video URLs instead of crawling huge channels.
• Set maxVideosPerChannel to limit scope.

Is it legal to scrape YouTube?

Yes, scraping publicly available data is legal. This Actor only extracts public information such as metadata and auto-generated captions that are accessible to any viewer.

Best practices:

• Use ethically and respect content creators.
• Do not use scraped data for copyright infringement.
• Review YouTube's Terms of Service regarding data usage.

Troubleshooting

No transcript found

• Ensure the video actually has captions (CC button).
• Try a different language code if the video is not in English.
• Some auto-generated captions may not be immediately available for new videos.

Proxy errors

• YouTube has strict bot detection. Ensure you are using high-quality residential proxies if you encounter blocking.

Use cases

Content Strategy Optimization

Analyze thousands of transcripts from competitors to identify content gaps and winning keywords for your own strategy.

Automated Summarization

Feed extracted transcripts into an LLM (like GPT-4) to generate concise summaries, study notes, or newsletters from video content.

Support and feedback

• 📧 Issues? Use the Issues tab to report bugs.
• 💬 Questions? Check the troubleshooting section first.
• 🔧 Custom solution? Contact us for custom features.