🎬 YT-DLP Video Tools — YouTube Metadata & More

Extract video metadata, thumbnails, subtitles, and direct download URLs from YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Twitch, Instagram, and 1,000+ other sites — powered by yt-dlp.

What it does

This Actor wraps the battle-tested yt-dlp library and exposes it as a pay-per-video API. Give it a list of video URLs from any yt-dlp-supported site (YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter/X, Dailymotion, and ~1,000 more) and it returns clean structured JSON for each one.

You can request three different output modes:

• metadata (default) — title, description, view count, like count, upload date, channel, duration, thumbnails, chapters, tags, categories
• audio — same metadata plus a direct audio-stream URL (best-quality audio-only format)
• video — same metadata plus a direct video-stream URL (best-quality combined format)

Subtitles and caption tracks can be included on demand.

Buyers use this to build video research tools, podcast aggregators, content-analysis pipelines, transcript workflows, and competitive video-content monitoring.

Use cases

• Video research & analysis — pull metadata on thousands of videos for trend analysis
• Podcast / audio pipelines — get direct audio URLs to feed into transcription (Whisper, AssemblyAI)
• Content monitoring — track view-count growth on a list of competitor videos
• Thumbnail / chapter extraction — pull thumbnails and chapter markers for CMS imports
• Subtitle / caption mining — extract available subtitle tracks for translation or search indexing
• Multi-platform aggregation — unify metadata from YouTube + TikTok + Vimeo in one schema

Inputs

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
urls	array of strings	yes	["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"]	List of video URLs from any yt-dlp-supported site
format	string (enum)	no	metadata	metadata (no download URL), audio (best audio-only URL), or video (best combined URL)
subtitles	boolean	no	false	Include subtitle / caption track info in each result
maxVideos	integer	no	50	Maximum videos to process in one run (1–1,000)

Output

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)",
  "description": "The official video for...",
  "channel": "Rick Astley",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
  "uploadDate": "2009-10-25",
  "duration": 213,
  "viewCount": 1547821903,
  "likeCount": 17500000,
  "thumbnails": [
    { "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg", "width": 1280, "height": 720 }
  ],
  "tags": ["Rick Astley", "Never Gonna Give You Up"],
  "categories": ["Music"],
  "chapters": [],
  "subtitles": {},
  "audioUrl": null,
  "videoUrl": null,
  "extractor": "youtube",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-23T14:22:11Z"
}

When format=audio or format=video, the corresponding audioUrl / videoUrl field is populated with a time-limited direct-stream URL.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.01 per video result, plus a tiny $0.00005 per-GB Actor Start charge. Processing 100 videos costs roughly $1 total. You only pay for videos that successfully extract — broken or geo-blocked URLs cost only the start fee.

Comparison

Provider	Cost per video	Notes
NexGenData YT-DLP Video Tools	$0.01	Pay-per-video, 1,000+ supported sites, no key required
YouTube Data API v3	Free (with quota)	YouTube-only, no other platforms, quota of 10,000 units/day (~100 videos with full metadata)
RapidAPI YouTube scrapers	$0.001–$0.01/video on monthly tiers	Subscription model, single-platform, variable reliability
Self-hosted yt-dlp	"Free" (infra + maintenance)	Real cost is server time, IP rotation, captcha handling; expect ongoing maintenance
Bright Data Social Media Scraper	Custom pricing	Enterprise-grade, requires sales conversation, minimum commits

Use this Actor when you want zero infrastructure, multi-platform coverage from a single API, and pay-per-video billing wired into Apify's scheduling and dataset storage.

Cross-links

Other NexGenData video tools you may want to chain with this:

• Universal Video Extractor — single-URL metadata + direct stream URLs
• YouTube Channel Scraper — pull all videos from a channel
• TikTok Profile Scraper — TikTok-native scraper
• Video Transcript Extractor — captions/subtitles → plain text
• Instagram Reels Scraper — Reels-specific metadata

🚀 New to Apify?

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NexGenData — thenextgennexus.com

💰 Pricing Example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results.

• Typical run (small): 100 results × $0.025 = $2.50
• Medium run: 500 results × $0.025 = $12.50
• Large run (power user): 2,000 results × $0.025 = $50.00

Free Apify accounts get $5/mo in platform credit. A typical video + media tooling workflow at this scale typically exceeds the free credit — upgrade to a paid Apify plan for unrestricted use.

🔗 Related Actors

Pair with these for a complete workflow:

• 📝 YouTube Transcript Scraper — Captions & Text — pull full transcripts from any YouTube video
• 🔍 YouTube Comments Scraper — Bulk Comment Extractor — scrape YouTube comments for audience + sentiment signals
• 🎬 YouTube AI Summarizer — Transcripts & Summaries — AI-summarize long-form YouTube content
• 🎬 YouTube MCP — AI Video Search & Transcripts — MCP server bundling YouTube intel tools for AI agents
• 🎙️ Podcast Scraper — Episodes & Show Data — scrape podcast episode metadata from public RSS feeds

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