YouTube Transcript Scraper

Extract transcripts and subtitles from YouTube videos — with timestamps, in any available language, including auto-generated captions. Built for AI/LLM pipelines: clean text plus structured segments, at $3 per 1,000 videos.

What does it extract?

Per video: full transcript text, timestamped segments (start, duration, text), language and auto-generated flag, all available caption languages, plus video metadata (title, channel, duration, view count).

{
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video)",
    "channel": "Rick Astley",
    "language": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": false,
    "transcript": "We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I...",
    "segments": [
        { "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.96, "text": "We're no strangers to love" }
    ]
}

Why this scraper?

• 💰 $3 per 1,000 transcripts — comparable actors charge $5–$10 per 1,000.
• 🧾 You only pay for delivered transcripts — videos without captions or unavailable videos are reported but never charged.
• 🌍 Any language — request a preferred language with automatic fallback; manual captions preferred over auto-generated (configurable).
• ⏱️ Timestamps included — per-line start/duration for subtitle regeneration, clip finding, or RAG chunking.
• 🔗 Flexible input — full URLs, short youtu.be links, Shorts URLs, or bare video IDs.

Pricing

Event	Price	When charged
Actor start	$0.01	Once per run
Transcript scraped	$0.003	Per video with a successfully delivered transcript

Example: transcripts for 500 videos ≈ $0.01 + $1.50 = $1.51.

Input

{
    "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw", "jNQXAC9IVRw"],
    "language": "en",
    "preferManual": true,
    "includeSegments": true
}

Use cases

• AI & RAG pipelines — turn video libraries into searchable text corpora
• Content repurposing — blog posts, summaries, and social snippets from videos
• Research & media monitoring — analyze what's being said across channels
• Subtitle workflows — extract and translate caption tracks
• SEO — mine competitor video content for topic coverage

Works out of the box with the Apify MCP server so AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) can call it directly, and with the Apify API/SDKs, Zapier, and Make.

Notes

• Only publicly available caption data is collected.
• Videos with captions disabled return an item with error: "No captions available" and the list of available languages (never charged).
• Residential proxy (default) recommended: YouTube throttles datacenter IPs.
• Need batch channel-level extraction, SRT/VTT export, or translation? Open an issue in the Issues tab — answered within 24 hours.