🎬 YouTube Transcript Scraper — Subtitles, Captions & Video Text

Extract transcripts, subtitles, and captions from any YouTube video. Get auto-generated or manual captions in any language, with optional timestamps. Supports bulk extraction from video URLs or video IDs, and outputs as structured JSON, plain text, or SRT subtitle format.

No API key required — just paste your YouTube URLs and get clean transcript data in seconds.

🚀 What does this Actor do?

This Actor downloads and parses YouTube video transcripts (also called subtitles or captions) using the same internal API YouTube uses for its own player. It handles:

• Multiple languages — Request transcripts in any available language with automatic fallback
• Timestamped segments — Each transcript piece comes with start time and duration for precise navigation
• Flexible output — Choose between structured JSON segments, plain concatenated text, or SRT subtitle format
• Bulk processing — Pass multiple video URLs or IDs in a single run

Perfect for content repurposing, SEO keyword extraction from video content, accessibility compliance, or building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines from YouTube videos.

💡 Use Cases

• Content repurposing — Convert YouTube video transcripts into blog posts, social media snippets, or newsletter content automatically
• RAG & AI pipelines — Feed video transcripts into LLMs for summarization, Q&A, or knowledge base construction
• SEO & accessibility — Extract captions for keyword research or to add subtitles to your own content

📊 Output Example

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "language": "en",
  "format": "structured",
  "transcript": [
    {
      "text": "We're no strangers to love",
      "offset": 0,
      "duration": 3000
    },
    {
      "text": "You know the rules and so do I",
      "offset": 3000,
      "duration": 2800
    }
  ],
  "fullText": "We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I..."
}

⚙️ Input Tips

Parameter	Tip
urls	Paste full YouTube URLs — supports watch?v=, youtu.be/, and playlist URLs
videoIds	Alternative to URLs — just the 11-character video ID (e.g. dQw4w9WgXcQ)
language	Use ISO 639-1 codes (en, es, fr, de, ja, etc.). Actor falls back to the first available language if your choice isn't found
includeTimestamps	Set to true for timed segments (great for SRT or indexed search). Set to false for plain text output
outputFormat	structured = JSON with segments, plain_text = single text block, srt = standard subtitle format

🔑 Keywords

YouTube transcript scraper, YouTube subtitles extractor, video captions downloader, YouTube to text, video transcription, YouTube API alternative, extract YouTube transcript, video content analysis, SRT generator, YouTube SEO, video-to-text converter, caption extraction, YouTube scraping, content repurposing tool