YouTube Transcript Scraper Pro – Videos, Playlists, Channels, All Languages

Turn any YouTube video, Short, entire playlist or entire channel into clean, timestamped text – in any available language – with readable paragraphs, an optional summary and SRT subtitles. Paste URLs, get JSON. Videos that can't be processed are reported with the exact reason and never charged.

$0.002 per transcript ($2 per 1,000 videos) – up to 5× cheaper than the most popular alternative.

Why this scraper?

We read the reviews and issue tracker of the most-used YouTube transcript actor on Apify (17% of its runs fail) and fixed every recurring complaint:

Common complaint	YouTube Transcript Scraper Pro
"Returns empty string / no results"	Uses YouTube's own app endpoints, retries with a fresh session and proxy IP on any empty or blocked response
"No caption found" on videos that do have captions	Reads the full caption track list – human-made and auto-generated, in every language
HTTP 403 / blocked	Apify Proxy rotation + exponential backoff built in
"Impossible to retrieve video ID"	Accepts watch, youtu.be, Shorts, live, embed, mobile, music URLs, bare IDs, playlists and channels (@handle, /channel/, /c/, /user/)
One video per run	Bulk: hundreds of videos, playlists and channels in one run, de-duplicated
Target language ignored	Ordered language preference, human captions first, auto-translation fallback, or all languages at once
No metadata, raw text only	Title, channel, duration, views, thumbnail + clean text, timestamped text, paragraphs, summary, SRT
Live videos crash the run	Clear LIVE_STREAM status – captions appear after the stream ends
Paying for failures	Failed videos are listed with a reason code and not charged

Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aqz-KE-bpKQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRqwX-V7Uu6ZiZxtDDRCi6uhfTH4FilpH",
    "@TED"
  ],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 50,
  "languages": ["en", "ar"],
  "includeParagraphs": true,
  "includeSummary": true
}

• languages – your order of preference. Leave empty for the video's original language.
• translateTo – force YouTube's auto-translation into one language (e.g. ar, es).
• allLanguages – also return every other caption track in otherLanguages.
• allowAutoGenerated – turn off to accept human-made captions only.
• Output toggles: timestamped text, segments, paragraphs, summary, SRT, noise-tag removal.

Output example

{
  "videoId": "46v8M4RsCzg",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46v8M4RsCzg",
  "title": "Why We Should Design Cities Like Disney | Zach DeBoer | TED",
  "channelName": "TED",
  "channelId": "UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
  "durationSecs": 987,
  "viewCount": 38876,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/46v8M4RsCzg/sddefault.webp",
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "isTranslated": false,
  "wordCount": 2854,
  "text": "During the pandemic, I got really into watching videos about Disney theme parks. How they're built, their history...",
  "timestampedText": "[00:00] During the pandemic, I got really into watching videos\n[00:02] about Disney theme parks.\n...",
  "paragraphs": [
    { "start": 0, "end": 41.2, "timestamp": "00:00", "text": "During the pandemic, I got really into watching videos about Disney theme parks. How they're built, their history..." }
  ],
  "summary": "But at Disney theme parks, they were essential. So instead of designing places for people, we were now designing them for vehicles. Denser places also make us more money...",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 0, "end": 2.54, "duration": 2.54, "text": "During the pandemic, I got really into watching videos" },
    { "start": 2.582, "end": 3.791, "duration": 1.209, "text": "about Disney theme parks." }
  ],
  "availableLanguages": [
    { "languageCode": "ar", "languageName": "Arabic", "isAutoGenerated": false },
    { "languageCode": "en", "languageName": "English", "isAutoGenerated": false },
    { "languageCode": "es", "languageName": "Spanish", "isAutoGenerated": false }
  ],
  "status": "ok"
}

Failed video:

{ "videoId": "aqz-KE-bpKQ", "status": "failed", "errorCode": "NO_CAPTIONS", "error": "This video has no captions (neither manual nor auto-generated)." }

Error codes: NO_CAPTIONS, VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE, LOGIN_REQUIRED (private / age-restricted), LIVE_STREAM, INVALID_URL, EMPTY_SOURCE, BLOCKED.

Use cases

• AI & RAG pipelines – feed paragraphs with timestamps into vector databases and chatbots
• Content repurposing – turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, threads and show notes
• SEO – publish transcripts next to your videos; research competitors' channels
• Research & education – analyse lectures, interviews, podcasts and whole courses (playlists)
• Subtitles & translation – export SRT, pull every language a creator has uploaded
• Market & brand monitoring – scan entire channels for mentions of products or topics

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.002 per successfully extracted transcript = $2 per 1,000 videos. Playlists and channels are charged per video found with a transcript – listing is free, failed videos are free, extra languages (allLanguages) are free. Set Maximum cost per run and the scraper stops cleanly at your budget.

FAQ

Does it work without captions? No speech-to-text is performed – the scraper returns the captions YouTube has (human or automatic). Almost all spoken videos have automatic captions.

Channels – which videos? The channel's uploads, newest first, up to Max videos per playlist / channel.

Can I call it from code, Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent? Yes – via the Apify API, the JS/Python clients, all Apify integrations and the Apify MCP server.

Found a video that fails? Open an issue with the URL – we fix reports fast.