YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions, Timestamps, Channels

Get the transcript of any YouTube video in seconds, or of a whole playlist or channel in one run. You get the full text, timestamped segments and optional SRT subtitles, plus video metadata. It works with manual and auto-generated captions in any language.

No YouTube API key, no browser, no login. You pay only for transcripts actually delivered; videos without captions and failed requests are never charged.

What you can paste

• Video URLs: youtube.com/watch?v=..., youtu.be/..., youtube.com/shorts/..., youtube.com/live/...
• Plain 11-character video IDs: dQw4w9WgXcQ
• Playlist URLs: youtube.com/playlist?list=...
• Channel URLs: youtube.com/@handle, youtube.com/channel/UC... (newest videos first, optionally Shorts too)

Mix them freely in one run.

What you get

Field	Example
videoId, url	dQw4w9WgXcQ
title, channelName, channelId, channelUrl	video and channel info
durationSeconds, viewCount, isLive, thumbnailUrl	213, 1700000000, false
language, languageName, isAutoGenerated	en, English, false
availableLanguages	every caption track the video has
transcript	the full text in one string
wordCount	487
segments	[{ "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.24, "text": "We're no strangers to love" }, ...]
srt	ready-to-save SRT subtitles (optional)
error	only when a video has no transcript or is unavailable (not charged)

Use cases

• AI and LLM pipelines: feed video content into summaries, RAG, chatbots and content repurposing.
• Content creators and marketers: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, show notes and social posts; research what competitors say.
• SEO and research: analyse whole channels or playlists, find quotes and topics, build datasets.
• Accessibility and subtitles: download captions as SRT.

How to use

1. Paste videos, playlists or channels into Videos, playlists or channels.
2. Set Preferred languages (for example en, or es, en). The first available language wins; if none is available, the video's default captions are used.
3. Leave Allow auto-generated captions on to cover videos without human-made subtitles.
4. Run. Each video becomes one dataset record.

Example input

{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd"
  ],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "maxVideosPerChannel": 50,
  "outputSegments": true,
  "outputSrt": false
}

Example output

{
  "videoId": "_0G4OG39XjI",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0G4OG39XjI",
  "title": "WTF is a Googlebook?",
  "channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
  "durationSeconds": 852,
  "viewCount": 8444076,
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "wordCount": 2410,
  "transcript": "Okay, so Google is dropping a brand new category of computer, new operating system, ...",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 2.572, "duration": 0.83, "text": "Okay," },
    { "start": 3.484, "duration": 2.038, "text": "so Google is dropping a brand new category of computer," }
  ]
}

Pricing

Pay per transcript delivered. Proxies and compute are included. Videos without a transcript, private or removed videos and failed requests cost nothing.

Tips

• About half of all YouTube videos have only auto-generated captions, so keep Allow auto-generated captions on unless you need human-made subtitles only.
• Music videos and videos without speech often have no captions at all; they are returned with an error field and are not charged.
• For big channels, use Max videos per channel / playlist to control how far back you go.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key? No.

Can it translate transcripts? It returns the captions YouTube has for the video, in the language you pick from the available tracks. Machine translation is not included.

Something broke? Open an issue on the Issues tab and it will be fixed quickly.