🚀 Fast & Cheap YouTube Transcript Scraper

Extract transcripts (subtitles) and metadata from YouTube videos, channels, and search results at lightning speed. Powered by the industry-standard yt-dlp engine, this actor is designed to be lightweight, efficient, and cost-effective.

✨ Key Features

• ⚡ Lightning Fast: Bypasses heavy browser automation to fetch data directly via internal APIs.
• 💸 Cost Effective: Extremely low compute usage means you pay less per run.
• 🎯 Precise: Supports multiple languages, auto-generated captions, and timestamped outputs.
• 📚 Scalable: Scrape single videos, entire channels, or search results in bulk.
• 🛡️ Reliable: Uses high-quality Residential Proxies internally to bypass restrictions.

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📖 How to Use

1. Scrape Single Videos

Just paste the YouTube video URLs into the Direct URLs field.

Use Case: You have a specific list of videos you want to analyze.

2. Scrape Entire Channels

Paste the channel URL (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/@ChannelName) into Channel URLs.

• Use Max Videos per Channel to limit how many recent videos to fetch.
• Use Date Filter (e.g., "7 days") to only get this week's videos.

Use Case: Monitoring a competitor's daily uploads.

3. Scrape Search Results

Enter keywords into Search Terms.

• The actor will search YouTube and scrape the top results for you.
• Good for topic monitoring and trend analysis.

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⚙️ Key Configuration Options

Setting	Description	Recommended
Direct URLs	List of specific video links to scrape.	-
Search Terms	Keywords to search for on YouTube.	-
Channel URLs	Links to YouTube channels to scan.	-
Subtitle Language	Preferred language code (e.g., en, es, fr).	en
Prefer Auto-Generated	If true, uses auto-captions if manual ones aren't available.	false (unless needed)
Include Timestamps	If true, output includes start and duration for every sentence.	true

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📦 Output Example

The actor produces a clean JSON dataset. Each item represents one video:

{
  "type": "video",
  "id": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "viewCount": 320000000,
  "date": "2005-04-23T20:31:52-07:00",
  "hasCaptions": true,
  "transcript": [
    {
      "text": "All right, so here we are in front of the elephants.",
      "start": 0.5,
      "duration": 4.2
    },
    {
      "text": "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really...",
      "start": 4.7,
      "duration": 5.1
    }
  ],
  "fullText": "All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really..."
}

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❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need an API Key? A: No! This actor works without an official YouTube Data API key.

Q: Can I get data from specific dates? A: Yes! Use the 'Date Filter Mode' when scraping Channels to only fetching videos from the last X days.

Q: Is it expensive to run? A: No. Because it doesn't launch a full web browser (like Puppeteer/Playwright), it consumes very little memory and CPU, making it one of the cheapest options available.