YouTube Transcript Scraper

Paste YouTube links, get the full spoken text back — as clean paragraphs for AI prompts, or as timestamped SRT/VTT subtitle files. No cookies, no login, no API key of your own.

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

It takes any list of YouTube videos and returns each one's complete transcript along with the details you usually need next to it: title, channel, view count, duration, tags, thumbnail, and every subtitle language the video offers. Videos, Shorts, live replays and podcasts all work the same way.

Because it runs on Apify you can call it from the API, schedule it, feed it a list from Google Sheets, and export the results to JSON, CSV, Excel or straight into your own pipeline.

Why use it?

• Feed AI models. Plain-text transcripts are the cheapest way to summarise, translate, or answer questions about hours of video.
• Build RAG and search. Turn a channel's back catalogue into searchable text.
• Repurpose content. Blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn threads and show notes all start from the transcript.
• Ship subtitles. SRT and VTT output drops straight into a video player or editor.
• Research at scale. Compare what competitors, candidates or creators actually say, not just their titles.
• Accessibility. Give any video a readable text alternative.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste your YouTube links into YouTube videos — one per line.
3. Optionally set the language, the transcript format, or a translation target.
4. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Every link format works: youtube.com/watch?v=…, youtu.be/…, youtube.com/shorts/…, youtube.com/live/…, youtube.com/embed/…, and bare 11-character video ids. Extra parameters like &t=90s or &list=… are ignored, so you can paste straight from the address bar.

Input

Field	What it does
video_urls	Your videos, one per line. Links or bare ids, mixed freely.
languages	Comma-separated preference order, e.g. en, es, de. en also matches en-US and en-GB. Falls back to the closest available track.
translate_to	Optional 2-letter code. YouTube translates the subtitles for you. If a video offers no translation, the original language is returned instead of nothing.
allow_auto_generated	On by default, so videos with only automatic captions still return a transcript. Turn off for human-written subtitles only.
text_format	plain (one paragraph), srt, or vtt.
include_segments	Adds a segments array with the start time, duration and text of every caption line.
concurrency	How many videos run at once (1–20).
proxy_configuration	Residential is the default and is strongly recommended.

{
    "video_urls": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
        "https://youtu.be/5MgBikgcWnY",
        "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ImRy_PiXstI"
    ],
    "languages": "en",
    "text_format": "plain",
    "include_segments": true,
    "proxy_configuration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Output

One row per video:

{
    "video_id": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "title": "Me at the zoo",
    "channel": "jawed",
    "channel_id": "UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
    "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
    "description": "The first video on YouTube…",
    "duration_seconds": 19,
    "view_count": 406065439,
    "keywords": ["me at the zoo", "jawed karim", "first youtube video"],
    "is_live": false,
    "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jNQXAC9IVRw/hqdefault.jpg",
    "language_code": "en",
    "language": "English",
    "is_auto_generated": false,
    "available_languages": ["de", "en"],
    "transcript": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants…",
    "word_count": 39,
    "character_count": 217,
    "scraped_at": "2026-08-24T12:35:04.371676+00:00",
    "segments": [
        { "start": 1.2, "duration": 2.16, "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants" },
        { "start": 5.318, "duration": 2.656, "text": "the cool thing about these guys is that they have really..." }
    ]
}

With text_format set to srt or vtt, the transcript field holds a ready-to-save subtitle file instead of a paragraph.

Dataset views

• Transcripts — thumbnail, title, channel, language, word count and the transcript itself. The one you will use most.
• Timed lines — the caption lines with their start times, for anything that needs to jump to a moment in the video.
• Video details — channel, tags, duration, views and the full list of subtitle languages.

Cost estimation

You are charged per result, and one result is one video with a transcript.

Run	Results	Notes
10 videos	10	A single playlist or a day's uploads.
500 videos	500	A mid-sized channel's back catalogue.
5,000 videos	5,000	A research dataset.

Videos with no transcript are not charged. They are skipped and listed under VIDEOS_WITHOUT_TRANSCRIPT in the run's key-value store, with the reason for each, so you always know what was left out.

Tips

• Raise Videos at a time to 10–20 for long lists; lower it if videos start being skipped.
• Turn off Include timed lines when you only need the text — smaller exports, faster downloads.
• Keep residential proxies on. YouTube returns transcripts far less reliably to datacenter addresses.
• Ask for a language you know exists. languages is a preference, not a filter — if none of your codes match, the closest available track is used and language_code in the output tells you what you got.

FAQ

Which videos have transcripts? Most videos with speech do, either human-written or automatic. Music videos, silent clips, and some very new uploads have none.

Are private or members-only videos supported? No. Only videos anyone can watch.

Does it work on Shorts? Yes, when the Short has captions.

Can I get a whole channel or playlist at once? Not yet — pass the individual video links for now.

Is scraping YouTube legal? Collecting publicly available data is generally legal, but what you do with it is your responsibility — respect copyright and the platform's terms. If you plan to publish or redistribute transcripts, take legal advice first.

Found a problem or want a field added? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.

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