🎬 YouTube Transcript API — Captions to JSON + LLM-ready text

Store support: Apify Issues. Videos without available captions, invalid inputs, and failed source requests are skipped or reported and are not billed as successful transcript results.

Billing

Successful transcript results use the Actor's existing Apify pricing. Unavailable captions and failed inputs are not successful billable results.

Get any YouTube video's transcript as clean, structured, AI-ready text. Extract transcripts and metadata from YouTube — single videos, or whole channels and playlists — in any available language. Every result ships as JSON and LLM-ready formats (clean Markdown + token-aware RAG chunks), so it drops straight into ChatGPT, Claude, a vector database, or your analytics pipeline.

No API keys. No monthly lock-in. Pay only for what you extract.

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⚡ Why this one

• YouTube done right. It solves YouTube's JavaScript/PoToken challenge and consent walls (via yt-dlp + deno) — the stuff that breaks naive scrapers. Use residential proxy for scale.
• LLM-ready out of the box. Not just raw captions — cleaned plain text, paragraphed Markdown, and embedding-ready chunks whose size and token_estimate come from a real tokenizer (tiktoken o200k/cl100k), accurate even for CJK/emoji/code.
• Channels & playlists. Paste a channel or playlist URL → it transcribes the videos (bounded by maxVideosPerList).
• Any language. Requests your preferred language and falls back to the closest available variant.

🚀 Build with it

• "Chat with a YouTube channel" — transcribe a creator's catalog, embed the chunks, ship a RAG bot.
• Research & datasets — talks, lectures, podcasts as clean timestamped text in any language.
• Repurposing — turn a video into a blog post, summary, or show notes from the Markdown.
• Analytics — bulk-pull transcripts for sentiment / topic analysis.

📥 Input (highlights)

Input example

Field	Type	Default	Description
videoUrls	array	— (required)	YouTube video, channel, or playlist URLs.
language	string	en	Preferred subtitle language; falls back to the closest variant.
maxVideosPerList	integer	20	Cap per channel/playlist (max 200; run ceiling 1,000).
outputFormats	array	all	json, text, markdown, chunks.
chunkTokens / tokenizer	—	400 / o200k	Real, enforced token budget for RAG chunks.
translateTo	string	—	Optionally also return a translated copy. Best-effort, often unavailable — uses YouTube's auto-translation.
priorityProcessing	boolean	false	Bulk priority add-on; only charged on a successful delivery once the premium event is published.
webhookUrl / webhookSecret	string	—	Optional HMAC-signed final-run summary to your HTTPS endpoint.
proxyConfiguration	object	Residential	Residential is the reliability default.

{
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc"],
  "language": "en",
  "outputFormats": ["json", "text", "markdown", "chunks"],
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

📤 Output

One dataset item per video: normalized metadata (title, channel, duration, views, upload date), transcript_found, is_auto_generated, selected_language, plus text, timestamped transcript, LLM-ready markdown, and token-aware chunks (with exact token_estimate). Add translateTo for a translated object alongside the original.

💸 Pricing

Pay-per-result — you pay per video successfully transcribed, no monthly subscription. Free Apify tier available to try it.

❓ Notes

Extraction needs the video to expose a caption track (human or auto-generated); unavailable captions are skipped and never billed. This is the YouTube-focused edition of the broader Transcript-to-RAG API, which is production-verified on YouTube and TED.

Keywords: YouTube transcript API, YouTube captions to JSON, YouTube subtitles download, transcript for LLM, RAG, YouTube channel transcript, playlist transcript, video to text, any language.