YouTube Transcript & Captions Scraper

Extract transcripts, captions, and subtitles from YouTube videos. Supports multiple languages, timestamps, SRT export, and batch processing. Fast and lightweight — no browser needed.

What can it do?

• Structured transcripts — Full transcript with timestamps and duration for each segment
• Plain text — Concatenated transcript text, ready for analysis
• SRT subtitles — Standard subtitle format for video editing tools
• Batch processing — Process multiple videos in a single run
• Multi-language — Request transcripts in any available language

Why use this scraper?

• ⚡ Fast — No browser automation, direct API extraction
• 🌍 Multi-language — Supports any language available on the video
• 📝 3 output formats — Structured JSON, plain text, or SRT subtitles
• ⏱️ Timestamps — Precise start time and duration for every segment
• 📦 Batch mode — Process dozens of videos at once

Input examples

Get transcript for a single video

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "language": "en",
  "outputFormat": "structured"
}

Batch processing with plain text output

{
  "videoIds": ["dQw4w9WgXcQ", "jNQXAC9IVRw"],
  "outputFormat": "plain_text"
}

Export as SRT subtitles

{
  "urls": ["https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "outputFormat": "srt",
  "language": "es"
}

Output example

Structured format

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "language": "en",
  "segmentCount": 42,
  "totalDurationMs": 213000,
  "plainText": "We're no strangers to love...",
  "transcript": [
    {
      "text": "We're no strangers to love",
      "startMs": 18000,
      "durationMs": 3500,
      "startFormatted": "0:18"
    }
  ]
}

SRT format

1
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:21,500
We're no strangers to love

Use cases

• Content repurposing — Turn video content into blog posts or articles
• Research — Analyze video transcripts for academic or market research
• SEO — Extract text content for search optimization
• Accessibility — Generate captions for videos without them
• Translation — Get base text for translating video content
• AI training — Build datasets from video transcripts

Pricing

Free to use. You only pay for Apify platform usage (compute and storage).

Limitations

• Only works with videos that have available captions/transcripts
• Auto-generated captions may have accuracy issues
• Language fallback: if requested language isn't available, returns whatever is