YouTube Transcript Scraper — videos, playlists & whole channels

Get the transcript (captions) of any YouTube video, or of every video in a playlist or channel, in one run. Full text, timestamped segments and optional AI-ready chunks for embeddings, RAG, summaries and content repurposing.

Why this one

• Videos, playlists and channels: paste youtube.com/@channel and get the transcripts of its latest N videos. No need to collect video URLs first.
• Any language, your order of preference: ["pt", "en"] picks Portuguese if it exists (including pt-BR), otherwise English, otherwise the first available.
• Human captions first: manual captions are preferred over auto-generated ones (optional), and every item says which one you got.
• Auto-translate to any language with YouTube's own translation (translateTo).
• AI-ready chunks: set chunkWords: 300 and get blocks of ~300 words with start and end times, ready to embed.
• Built-in block handling: YouTube blocks many server IPs. The Actor starts direct and switches to Apify Proxy automatically on the first block, so runs don't fail halfway.
• Pay only for transcripts delivered. Videos without captions, private or unavailable videos are listed with the reason and cost nothing.

Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL..."
  ],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 50,
  "chunkWords": 300
}

Output (one item per video)

Field	Description
videoId, url, title, channel, duration	video info
language, languageName, isAutoGenerated	which caption track was used
text, wordCount	full transcript as plain text
segments	[{start, duration, text}] — timestamped lines (optional)
chunks	[{start, end, text}] — ~N-word blocks for AI (optional)
error	reason when no transcript was available (not charged)

Example output

One real item from a test run (long texts and lists shortened):

{
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "duration": null,
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "text": "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 (b...",
  "wordCount": 39,
  "segments": [
    {
      "start": 1.2,
      "duration": 2.16,
      "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the\nelephants"
    },
    {
      "start": 5.32,
      "duration": 2.66,
      "text": "the cool thing about these guys is that they\nhave really..."
    },
    {
      "start": 7.97,
      "duration": 4.64,
      "text": "really really long trunks"
    }
  ]
}

Notes

Transcripts only exist when the creator uploaded captions or YouTube generated them automatically. Live streams that are still running and some music videos have none.

How much does it cost?

You pay only for results delivered, at a fixed price per item. Apify platform usage is included in that price, so there are no compute costs on top. Errors and items that couldn't be found are free.

What you get	Price	Example
Transcript delivered	$0.004 each	1,000 transcript delivereds = $4.00

The Apify Free plan includes $5 of monthly credit, enough for about 1,250 transcript delivereds per month at no cost. You can also set a maximum spend per run.

On paid Apify plans it gets cheaper automatically: 10% off on Starter, 20% on Scale and 30% on Business.

Feedback

Found a bug, a site change, or need an extra field? Open an issue in the Issues tab: every issue is read and answered. If this actor saved you time, a review helps other people find it.