YouTube Transcript Scraper — Videos, Shorts, Channels, Playlists & Search

Get clean YouTube transcripts (captions/subtitles) with timestamps, SRT and video metadata — in bulk, without the YouTube API, without logging in.

Paste video links, Shorts, @channels, playlists or just search keywords. You get one row per video with the full text, ready for AI/LLM pipelines, RAG, content repurposing, SEO research or market analysis.

Why this actor

• Any input: video URLs (watch, youtu.be, /shorts/, /live/), video IDs, channel URLs or @handles (Videos, Shorts or Live tab), playlists, and YouTube search.
• Pick the language: ordered language preference, manual captions preferred over auto-generated (or the other way round), and optional auto-translation to any language YouTube supports.
• Ready-to-use formats: plain text, timestamped segments (start, duration, text) and an SRT file per video.
• Metadata included: title, channel, channel ID, duration, view count, thumbnail, and optionally the description and tags.
• Fair pricing: you pay only for transcripts delivered. Private, removed and caption-less videos are free.
• Built for reliability: residential proxy rotation, automatic session retirement when YouTube shows a bot check, mobile-client fallback and retries.

Pricing

Pay per result: $3.00 per 1,000 transcripts ($0.003 per transcript).

Use case	Transcripts	Cost
Try it out	10	$0.03
One channel's back catalogue	500	$1.50
Research dataset	10,000	$30.00

Use Max transcripts in total to put a hard cap on any run. Apify's free plan monthly credits work with this actor.

Input

Field	Description
urls	Videos, Shorts, channels (@handle, /channel/UC…), playlists — URLs or IDs.
searchQueries	Keywords; the actor takes videos from YouTube search results.
maxVideosPerSource	Max videos per channel / playlist / search (default 50).
maxResults	Stop after this many transcripts (0 = unlimited).
channelTab	videos, shorts or streams.
languages	Preferred caption languages in order, e.g. ["en", "es"].
preferAutoGenerated	Prefer auto captions over manual ones.
translateTo	Translate captions to this language code (e.g. en).
includeSegments	Timestamped segments array (default on).
includeSrt	Add an srt field.
includeDescription	Add the description and tags.
outputFailedVideos	Also list videos without transcripts, with a reason (free).
proxyConfiguration	Residential proxy is the default and strongly recommended.

Example:

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd",
    "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"
  ],
  "searchQueries": ["how to start a saas"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 20,
  "languages": ["en"],
  "includeSrt": true
}

Output

One dataset item per video. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or read it via the API.

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)",
  "channelName": "Rick Astley",
  "channelId": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
  "lengthSeconds": 213,
  "viewCount": 1826117339,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/dQw4w9WgXcQ/sddefault.webp",
  "source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-13T09:58:37.060Z",
  "status": "ok",
  "language": "en",
  "languageName": "English",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "isTranslated": false,
  "availableLanguages": ["en", "en (auto)", "de-DE", "ja", "pt-BR", "es-419"],
  "wordCount": 487,
  "transcript": "[♪♪♪] ♪ We're no strangers to love ♪ ♪ You know the rules and so do I ♪ …",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 1.36, "duration": 1.68, "text": "[♪♪♪]" },
    { "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.24, "text": "♪ We're no strangers to love ♪" }
  ],
  "srt": "1\n00:00:01,360 --> 00:00:03,040\n[♪♪♪]\n…"
}

Run statistics (transcripts, videos without captions, failures) are saved to the RUN_STATS record in the run's key-value store.

Use with AI agents (MCP), LangChain, RAG & the API

This actor is a ready-made tool for AI agents: an LLM can call it, wait for the run and read clean JSON back.

MCP server (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, any MCP client) — add Apify's hosted MCP server with this actor enabled as a tool:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=murch1k/youtube-transcript-scraper",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

LangChain / LangGraph (pip install langchain-apify, set APIFY_API_TOKEN):

from langchain_apify import ApifyActorsTool, ApifyWrapper
from langchain_core.documents import Document

# 1) give the actor to an agent as a tool
tool = ApifyActorsTool("murch1k/youtube-transcript-scraper")

# 2) or load results as Documents for a RAG index
loader = ApifyWrapper().call_actor(
    actor_id="murch1k/youtube-transcript-scraper",
    run_input={"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"], "searchQueries": ["how to start a saas"], "maxVideosPerSource": 20, "languages": ["en"], "includeSrt": True},
    dataset_mapping_function=lambda item: Document(page_content=item["transcript"], metadata={"url": item.get("url")}),
)
docs = loader.load()

REST API — one synchronous call, dataset items in the response:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/murch1k~youtube-transcript-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://www.youtube.com/@mkbhd", "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTt2d9bfVyTiXJA-UTHn6WwU"], "searchQueries": ["how to start a saas"], "maxVideosPerSource": 20, "languages": ["en"], "includeSrt": true}'

Also works with the Apify Python/JS clients, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, webhooks and schedules. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS.

RAG tip: transcript is the field to chunk and embed; keep videoId, title, channelName and url as metadata, and use segments[].start to link answers back to the exact second.

Use cases

• AI & LLM: feed transcripts into ChatGPT/Claude, build RAG knowledge bases, summarise channels.
• Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, social threads.
• Market & competitor research: what topics, products and claims competitors talk about.
• SEO: mine keywords and questions from top-ranking videos.
• Subtitles: download SRT files for editing or translation.

Integrations

Works with the Apify API, Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, webhooks and the Apify MCP server, so AI agents can call it directly.

FAQ

Does it need a YouTube account or API key? No.

What if a video has no captions? It is skipped and not charged. Turn on outputFailedVideos to see these videos with the reason.

Why are some videos missing? Private, deleted, members-only and some age-restricted videos have no public captions.

Is scraping YouTube legal? The actor only reads publicly available caption data. You are responsible for how you use the data, including copyright and YouTube's Terms of Service, and local law.

Support

Found a problem or need a feature (e.g. comments, chapters, Whisper transcription for videos without captions)? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab and we'll respond quickly.