YouTube Scraper — Videos, Transcripts, Comments & Channels

Extract everything from YouTube in a single Actor: video metadata, full transcripts (with timestamps), comments with reply threads, channel profiles with social links, and search results. No official API keys, no quotas, no browser — fast and low-cost.

Most YouTube scrapers make you run three or four separate Actors (one for metadata, one for transcripts, one for comments…) and bill you separately for each. This one does it all in one call.

Features

• 🎥 Video metadata — title, description, view count, like count, duration, publish date, keywords, thumbnails
• 📝 Transcripts — full text, timestamped segments, and ready-to-use SRT subtitles, with language selection and auto-generated fallback
• 💬 Comments — top comments including reply threads, with author, like count, and creator/verified flags
• 📺 Channels — subscribers, total views, video count, country, join date, external & social links, and recent videos
• 🔍 Search — scrape YouTube search results, optionally enriched with transcripts/comments/channel data
• ⚡ Fast & cheap — pure HTTP (no headless browser), 512 MB, works with datacenter proxies

Input

Provide any combination of video URLs, search queries, and channel URLs, then toggle the add-ons you want.

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"],
  "searchQueries": ["machine learning tutorial"],
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 20,
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown"],
  "includeTranscript": true,
  "transcriptLanguage": "en",
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxComments": 100,
  "includeChannel": true
}

Field	Type	Description
videoUrls	array	Video or Shorts URLs (or bare 11-char IDs)
searchQueries	array	Search terms; results scraped as videos
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	Videos to return per search query (default 20)
channelUrls	array	Channel URLs (@handle or /channel/UC…)
includeTranscript	boolean	Attach the transcript to each video
transcriptLanguage	string	Preferred language code, e.g. en, es, de
includeComments	boolean	Attach comments (with replies) to each video
maxComments	integer	Max comments per video incl. replies
includeChannel	boolean	Attach the uploader's channel profile to each video

Output

Each video is one dataset item:

{
  "type": "video",
  "id": "aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "viewCount": 23621207,
  "likeCount": 551760,
  "durationSeconds": 1120,
  "publishDate": "2017-10-05T08:11:25-07:00",
  "channel": { "name": "3Blue1Brown", "subscriberCount": 8460000, "links": [ … ] },
  "transcript": {
    "available": true,
    "language": "en",
    "segments": [ { "start": 4.2, "duration": 3.1, "text": "This is a 3." } ],
    "fullText": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written …",
    "srt": "1\n00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:07,300\nThis is a 3.\n…"
  },
  "comments": [
    { "author": "@user", "text": "Great video!", "likeCount": 13000, "replies": [ … ] }
  ]
}

Channels and standalone search results are emitted as type: "channel" and type: "search-result" items.

Common use cases

• Feed transcripts to an LLM for summaries, RAG, or content repurposing
• Comment & sentiment analysis on any video or channel
• Lead generation — pull business emails and social links from channel About pages
• Competitor & trend research across search results and channel catalogs

Integration

Run it from the Apify API, the JavaScript/Python clients, or schedule it in the Apify Console. Export results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via webhook.

Notes

Only public data is scraped. If you hit occasional blocks at scale, enable residential proxies in the input.