YouTube transcript scraper and API: captions with timestamps, plain text or SRT, title, channel, views and duration for videos, whole channels and playlists. No login.
New name and title: YouTube Transcript Scraper — Videos, Channels & Playlists
(youtube-transcript-scraper).
New input channelUrls: get transcripts for a channel's newest videos. Accepts
/@handle, /channel/UC…, /c/…, /user/… links (optionally ending in /videos,
/shorts or /streams), bare @handles and UC… channel IDs.
New input playlistUrls: any link with a list= parameter or a bare playlist ID.
New inputs channelVideoType (Videos / Shorts / Live streams), maxVideosPerChannel
and maxVideosPerPlaylist (default 50 each).
New output fields sourceType (video, channel or playlist) and sourceUrl (the
link you entered that produced the item).
Videos found through several links are fetched and charged once.
A channel or playlist that cannot be read (not found, private, missing tab) is listed in
the run summary; the rest of the run continues.
A channel or playlist link pasted into Video URLs now fails with a hint naming the right
field.
Console form is prefilled with a working example; default memory lowered to 256 MB.
Default proxy is now Apify Proxy group RESIDENTIAL (prefill and default): YouTube
bot-checks Apify datacenter IPs for every video.
Transcripts and metadata now come from YouTube's player API with response field masks
plus the caption file, instead of downloading the full watch page: ~20 KB of proxy
traffic per video instead of ~640 KB.
A run in which YouTube blocked every video and nothing was saved now ends as Failed
with a message to use a residential proxy, instead of succeeding with an empty dataset.
Age-restricted, private and unavailable videos are reported with their own reason
(age_restricted, video_private, video_unavailable); "no transcript in this
language" errors list the languages the video does have.
Channel and playlist listing uses the same API (about 2 KB per page instead of a
~120 KB page).
README rewritten for the Store; developer notes moved to DEVELOPMENT.md.
