YouTube Transcript Scraper - Bulk & AI-Ready

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper extracts transcripts (captions/subtitles) from YouTube in bulk. Give it any mix of:

• 🎬 Video URLs or IDs, including Shorts and live replays
• 📃 Playlists, which are expanded into all their videos
• 📺 Channels (@handle, /channel/UC…, /c/…), which return the latest uploads
• 🔍 Search queries, which return transcripts for the top results

For each video you get the full transcript text, timestamped segments, optional SRT / WebVTT subtitles and text with [hh:mm:ss] timestamps. You also get video metadata: title, channel, duration, views, keywords, description and thumbnail.

It supports 100+ languages: it prefers human-made captions, falls back to auto-generated ones, and can translate any transcript with YouTube's built-in translation.

Why use it?

• 🤖 AI, RAG & LLM apps: feed clean transcripts into ChatGPT, Claude, embeddings or vector databases. Each row includes wordCount and approxTokens so you can budget context windows.
• ✍️ Content repurposing: turn videos into blog posts, newsletters, show notes and social threads.
• 📊 Research & analysis: analyze what whole channels or search results say about a topic, product or brand.
• 🎓 Education & accessibility: download subtitles as SRT/VTT for editing and translation.
• 🔌 Automation: call it from the Apify API, Make, Zapier, n8n or any MCP client. Schedule it to process new uploads from a channel.

How much does it cost?

$2 per 1,000 transcripts. You pay only for videos where a transcript was extracted. Videos without captions, private or unavailable videos are free. Listing channel and playlist videos is also free.

Videos	Price
100	$0.20
1,000	$2
10,000	$20

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste video, playlist or channel URLs into Videos, playlists or channels, and optionally add Search queries.
3. Set Preferred languages (default en) and, if needed, Translate to.
4. Choose output formats: segments, timestamped text, SRT or VTT.
5. Click Start, then download as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or fetch the data through the API.

Input example

{
    "sources": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
        "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...",
        "@mkbhd"
    ],
    "searchQueries": ["python tutorial"],
    "maxVideosPerSource": 20,
    "languages": ["en"],
    "includeSegments": true,
    "includeSrt": true
}

Output example

{
    "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
    "title": "Me at the zoo",
    "channelName": "jawed",
    "channelId": "UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
    "durationSeconds": 19,
    "viewCount": 380000000,
    "hasTranscript": true,
    "language": "en",
    "isAutoGenerated": false,
    "isTranslated": false,
    "availableLanguages": ["en", "de", "es"],
    "wordCount": 39,
    "approxTokens": 52,
    "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants...",
    "segments": [
        { "start": 1.2, "duration": 2.16, "end": 3.36, "text": "All right, so here we are," }
    ],
    "srt": "1\n00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:03,360\nAll right, so here we are,\n"
}

Videos without a transcript are still listed, with hasTranscript: false, the reason in error, and their metadata. They are not charged.

FAQ

Does it work for videos without captions? No. It returns YouTube's existing human-made or auto-generated captions. Most videos have auto-generated captions, so coverage is high. Videos with captions disabled come back with hasTranscript: false, and you are not charged.

Can I get transcripts in another language? Yes. List your preferred languages in order, and use Translate to to machine-translate any transcript through YouTube.

How many videos can I process? Thousands per run. Channels and playlists are expanded automatically up to Max videos per playlist / channel / search.

Why residential proxies? YouTube blocks data-center IPs. Residential proxies are the default because they make runs reliable, and their cost is included in the price.

Is it legal? It only reads publicly available captions and metadata. Make sure your use of the content respects copyright and YouTube's terms.

Something not working? Open an issue on the Issues tab. We usually fix problems within days.