YouTube Transcript Scraper: Bulk Videos, Shorts & Timestamps

Turn YouTube videos into text for RAG, research and content workflows. Submit video URLs or IDs and retrieve available captions with optional timestamps.

What you get

• Accept video URLs or IDs, including supported Shorts and live-replay URLs.
• Retrieve available caption text and language, with optional timestamp segments.
• Process batches and export structured transcript records for RAG, n8n, Make and AI agents.

Quick start

Edit the sample target in Apify Console, or pass an explicit target through the API:

{
  "videos": [
    "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"
  ],
  "include_timestamps": true,
  "use_paid_upstream": false
}

Results are written to the default dataset. Use the overview dataset view to inspect records and export available columns as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Captured output example

Selected fields from an earlier validation run; these values are not current measurements.

{
  "video_id": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "duration_seconds": 19,
  "language": "en",
  "is_auto_generated": false,
  "transcript": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants the cool thing about these guys is that they have really... really really long trunks and that's cool (baaaaaaaaaaahhh!!) and that's pretty much all there is to say"
}

Sources and coverage

The Actor retrieves accessible captions; it does not transcribe audio or guarantee captions for every video. Unavailable, blocked, deleted or captionless videos return explained outcomes. Language availability depends on YouTube.

The default uses public or platform-native sources with external paid data providers disabled. Apify Actor events and platform usage are separate from external API costs. Unsupported or unavailable fields are reported honestly; this is not a guarantee of complete source coverage.

Pricing

Published standard event rates (before plan discounts):

Event	USD per event	Meaning
apify-actor-start	$5e-05	Actor Start
transcript	$0.003	Transcript

Startup events, when configured, are separate from result events. Result-event charging follows the Actor's eligibility and useful-output rules; public fallback or diagnostic outputs may be uncharged. The live Pricing tab is authoritative. Set a maximum total charge before starting a run.

API, MCP and workflow integrations

Actor ID: hirepulse/youtube-transcript-scraper. Run this Actor through Apify API or its official client libraries. Connect it to n8n or Make using the Apify integration, or expose it to AI agents through Apify's MCP server. This Actor does not host its own MCP server. API calls must supply the required target; Console prefill is an editable example, not a hidden API target.

Use cases and data coverage

Dimension	Coverage
Use cases	RAG ingestion, transcript collection, video research and content analysis
Target sources	YouTube captions
Output	Structured JSON records in an Apify dataset

Store categorization is assigned by Apify. No search position, AI recommendation, completeness or fixed runtime is guaranteed.

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