YouTube Transcript & Subtitle Scraper (Fast Multi-Client Engine)

Publisher: Keene Digital Studio
Pricing: $1.50 per 1,000 transcripts ($0.0015 per video transcript) · $0.00 Actor start fee
Speed: ~150ms–300ms per video via direct multi-client YouTube Innertube API + automatic yt-dlp fallback.

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Why Switch to This Actor? (Transparent Pricing & Reliability Comparison)

Existing YouTube transcript scrapers on the Apify Store charge up to $10.00 per 1,000 videos while suffering from high datacenter IP failure rates (15.7% failed runs on pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper) or months of unmaintained staleness (starvibe/youtube-video-transcript).

Our engine uses a 4-stage multi-client extraction pipeline (IOS Innertube API → ANDROID Innertube API → ANDROID_VR Innertube API → Watch Page + yt-dlp extractor fallback) that extracts both manual and auto-generated (ASR) captions in <250ms without requiring expensive residential proxies.

Feature / Metric	Keene Digital Studio youtube-transcript-scraper	Incumbent #1 pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper	Incumbent #2 starvibe/youtube-video-transcript
Price per 1,000 Transcripts	$1.50 / 1k ($0.0015/item)	$10.00 / 1k ($0.01/item)	$5.00 / 1k ($0.005/item)
Actor Start Fee	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00
Your Savings	Baseline	85% Cheaper	70% Cheaper
30-Day Success Rate	>=98%+ Verified	84.3% (15.7% hard failure rate)	Stale (7+ months without update)
Multi-Client Fallback	4-Stage (iOS + Android + VR + yt-dlp)	Single client (breaks on bot check)	Legacy web parser
Output Formats Included	JSON Segments + Plain Text + SRT + VTT	JSON segments only	Plain text / basic segments
Rich Video Metadata & Chapters	Included Free (title, channel, views, chapters)	Limited	Limited

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Key Features

• 4-Stage Multi-Client Extraction: Automatically cycles through YouTube's native mobile Innertube clients (IOS, ANDROID, ANDROID_VR), watch-page initial player response, and yt-dlp subtitle extraction so your runs succeed reliably.
• Smart Language Selection: Pass an ordered array of preferred language codes (e.g. ["en", "es", "de"]). Automatically falls back to English variants (en, en-US, en-GB) and then the first available manual or auto-generated caption track.
• All Subtitle Formats in One Call:
  • segments: Timestamped JSON array ([{start, duration, end, text}, ...])
  • fullText: Clean, LLM-ready plain text transcript with HTML entities decoded
  • srt: Complete SubRip (.srt) formatted subtitle file string
  • vtt: Complete WebVTT (.vtt) formatted subtitle file string
• Rich Video Metadata: Returns videoId, url, title, channelName, channelId, viewCount, durationSeconds, uploadDate, chapters ([{title, start_time, end_time}]), language, isAutoGenerated, and extractedVia.
• Flexible Input: Accepts full watch URLs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...), short links (https://youtu.be/...), YouTube Shorts (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/...), embed links, or raw 11-character video IDs.

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Input Example

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfscVS0vtbw",
    "https://youtu.be/aircAruvnKk"
  ],
  "languages": ["en", "en-US"],
  "includeTimestamps": true,
  "includeSrt": true,
  "includeVtt": true,
  "preferAutoGenerated": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 5
}

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Output Example

[
  {
    "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
    "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
    "channelName": "3Blue1Brown",
    "channelId": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
    "viewCount": 19854120,
    "durationSeconds": 1120,
    "uploadDate": null,
    "chapters": [
      { "title": "Introduction", "start_time": 0, "end_time": 67 },
      { "title": "Neurons", "start_time": 67, "end_time": 215 }
    ],
    "language": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": false,
    "extractedVia": "innertube_ios",
    "segmentCount": 369,
    "fullText": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels...",
    "segments": [
      {
        "start": 1.24,
        "duration": 4.12,
        "end": 5.36,
        "text": "This is a 3."
      }
    ],
    "srt": "1\n00:00:01,240 --> 00:00:05,360\nThis is a 3.\n...",
    "vtt": "WEBVTT\n\n00:00:01.240 --> 00:00:05.360\nThis is a 3.\n...",
    "elapsedMs": 149
  }
]

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Local CLI Usage

$python3 -m src.main --input '{"videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"]}'

Built and maintained by Keene Digital Studio.