YouTube Subtitles Scraper — SRT Captions, 100% Free

Download the subtitles of any YouTube video: every caption line with its start time and duration, plus the full text. Human-written captions preferred over auto-generated, in any language the video publishes.

100% free

This Actor is free. There is no charge per video and no charge per run from us — you pay only Apify's own platform usage for the run, exactly as you would for any Actor you wrote yourself.

It is free because it costs us nothing to operate: it reads YouTube's own first-party endpoint, so there is no upstream scraper to pay for. No API key, no cookies, nothing that expires.

What you get per video

• segments — every subtitle line with start and duration, ready to convert to SRT or VTT (each segment is one cue)
• text — the full caption text joined into one clean string
• language and whether the captions are human-written or auto-generated — human-written always wins when both exist
• word_count, video_id, title

{
  "video_id": "aircAruvnKk",
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "language": "en",
  "is_generated": false,
  "duration_seconds": 1105.64,
  "segment_count": 286,
  "word_count": 3357,
  "text": "Full caption text as one clean string ...",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 12.4, "duration": 3.1, "text": "Let me start with a question." }
  ]
}

(Verified against a live run, 2026-08-17 — real field set, no fabricated keys.)

Input

Field	What it does
videos	Video URLs or IDs — watch links, youtu.be, Shorts, embeds or bare 11-character IDs, mixed freely
language	Preferred two-letter subtitle language (en, fr, es, …). Empty = English, then the video default
includeSegments	Keep true for subtitle work — the segments are the cues
proxyConfiguration	Defaults to the Apify proxy — YouTube blocks datacenter IPs, so leave it on

Call it as a live API

This Actor runs in Standby: the container is already up, so an HTTP request answers in seconds — no cold start.

GET https://<standby-url>/?videos=aircAruvnKk,dQw4w9WgXcQ

Or POST the same JSON you would use as run input. The answer is JSON with transcripts, per-video source_errors, and totals.

For AI agents (MCP)

The same endpoint speaks the Model Context Protocol at /mcp. Agents get one tool, youtube_subtitles, that returns the captions of a video in a single call — usable from Claude, Cursor and any MCP client.

Honest failure modes

A video with subtitles disabled returns a NO_TRANSCRIPT source error, not a crash and not an empty file. Invalid references return INVALID_VIDEO with the reason. You are never billed for a failure — there is nothing to bill, everything is free.

The rest of the family

• YouTube Transcript Scraper — the same engine, transcript-first wording
• YouTube Channel & Playlist Transcripts — whole channels in bulk, $1/1K

Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Use the Issues tab on this Actor's Apify Store page, or message the author (om_kh) directly through Apify — every report gets a reply.