YouTube Transcript Scraper — Subtitles & Captions, Fast

Get the full transcript of any YouTube video, playlist or channel — every line with its timestamp, plus the whole text in one field, and SRT or WebVTT subtitle files if you want them. Paste links, press Start, download JSON, CSV or Excel.

Why this one

• ⚡ Fast. No browser is opened, ever. In our own test run, fifteen videos were processed in nine seconds.
• 📺 Videos, playlists and channels. Mix them in one list. A channel gives you its newest uploads, a playlist its videos — you choose how many.
• 💸 You pay only for transcripts you receive. A video without captions, an unavailable video, a bad link or a failed fetch is reported in the dataset — and costs nothing. Listing a playlist or channel is free.
• 🌍 Pick the language. Ask for de, es, ja… and a human-written track is chosen over an auto-generated one. If your language is missing, you get the video's best track instead, and the output says so.
• 🎬 Subtitle files included. Tick SRT or WebVTT and each transcript comes with a ready subtitle file.
• 🧾 Honest results. Every video gets a status — OK, NO_CAPTIONS or FAILED with the reason. Nothing silently comes back empty.
• 🔁 Built to keep working. Runs on residential proxy by default and retries on a fresh IP when YouTube pushes back.

What you get

For every video:

Field	What it is
status	OK, NO_CAPTIONS or FAILED
text	the whole transcript as one string — ready for an LLM, a summary or a search index
segments	every line with start and duration in seconds
srt, vtt	the transcript as a subtitle file, when you ask for it
title, channel, channelId	video details
lengthSeconds, viewCount	video details
language	the track you received, e.g. en, de-DE
isAutoGenerated	true for YouTube's automatic captions
languageMatched	false if your language was missing and another track was returned
availableLanguages	every caption track the video has
source	the playlist or channel link the video came from, if any
error	why a video has no transcript, when it has none

A link that is not a YouTube video, playlist or channel gets its own INVALID_INPUT record, so you can see what was skipped.

Example

{
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "status": "OK",
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "languageMatched": true,
  "segmentCount": 286,
  "segments": [
    { "start": 4.22, "duration": 1.18, "text": "This is a 3." },
    { "start": 6.06, "duration": 4.653, "text": "It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels," }
  ],
  "text": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels, ..."
}

How to use it

1. Paste links into YouTube links: regular video links, youtu.be short links, Shorts, embeds, live links, playlist links, channel links (@handle or /channel/…), or bare video ids.
2. For playlists and channels, set Max videos per playlist or channel (default 50). A channel gives you its newest uploads first.
3. Optionally set Language (default en) and tick SRT or WebVTT.
4. Press Start. Download the results from the Output tab.

You can also call it from the Apify API, from Make, Zapier or n8n, or from an AI agent through the Apify MCP server.

Machine translation (optional, best effort)

If a video has no track in your language, you can ask YouTube for its machine translation. YouTube limits this heavily — in our own test it came through for 1 of 8 videos. When it does not, you still receive the original transcript, marked translationFailed: true, at the normal price. Runs with translation on are also slower, because each refusal is retried. That is why it is off by default.

Pricing

You are charged per delivered transcript — see the price on this page. Videos without a transcript, bad links and playlist or channel listings are free. If your run has a Maximum charge, the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached, delivers what fits, and tells you how many videos were left for next time.

FAQ

A video came back as NO_CAPTIONS. The video has no captions and no automatic subtitles on YouTube, so there is nothing to download. You were not charged for it.

I asked for Hungarian but got English. The video has no Hungarian track. You get its best available track — a human-written English one if there is one — with languageMatched: false, and availableLanguages lists every language the video does have.

Are automatic captions included? Yes, when a video has no human-written track. isAutoGenerated tells you which one you got.

Private or age-restricted videos? They are reported as FAILED with YouTube's own reason and are not charged.

How many videos from a channel? Up to 1,000 per channel or playlist, set by Max videos per playlist or channel. The newest uploads come first.