YouTube Transcript Scraper: Videos, Channels and Playlists

Get YouTube transcripts in bulk as clean text with timestamps. Paste video links, Shorts, a whole channel, a playlist or a search, and every video comes back with its full transcript, the caption language, whether the captions are human-written or automatic, and the video's title, channel, length and views. You are only charged when a transcript actually exists, so videos without captions, private or removed videos cost nothing.

Tired of a transcript scraper that takes one video per run, fails every few runs and charges you anyway? This one takes as many videos as you like in one run. It retries on a fresh IP when YouTube pushes back and switches to a residential IP automatically when YouTube asks for a bot check, at no extra cost. Every row tells you plainly why a video had no transcript.

Also from Oski: Telegram Channel Scraper for public channel posts, and Website Contact Finder for a creator's business email from their website.

What you can use it for

• AI and RAG builders turning a channel or playlist into a text corpus for search, chatbots or fine-tuning.
• Content repurposers turning videos into blog posts, newsletters, threads and show notes.
• Researchers and journalists searching what was said across hundreds of videos, with timestamps to cite.
• Marketers studying the scripts of competitors' and top creators' videos, hooks included.
• Educators and students getting lecture and tutorial transcripts for notes and study.
• Accessibility and localisation teams exporting ready-made SRT subtitle files.

How to use it

1. Under YouTube videos, Shorts, channels or playlists, paste links one per line (or several on one line). Video IDs, youtu.be links and @handles work too.
2. Optionally add Search phrases to get transcripts of the top videos for a topic.
3. Set Max videos per channel, playlist or search (single videos always count as one) and your Preferred languages, then click Start.
4. When it finishes, open the Output tab and download as CSV, Excel or JSON.

While it runs, the status line at the top of the run page shows progress (for example "Source 2 of 3: @veritasium. 48 transcripts so far."). When it finishes, the same line says what was found and explains anything that came back without a transcript, so you never have to read the log.

How much does it cost?

A $0.002 start fee per run, then $0.003 per transcript. Videos with no captions, only "[Music]" captions, or that are private, removed or age-restricted are returned for your records and not charged. Every row has a charged field so you can see exactly what you paid for.

Transcripts	Maths	Cost
1	$0.002 + 1 x $0.003	$0.005
100	$0.002 + 100 x $0.003	about $0.30
1,000	$0.002 + 1,000 x $0.003	about $3.00
10,000	$0.002 + 10,000 x $0.003	about $30.00

A whole channel of 1,000 videos costs about three dollars, so put everything into one run rather than paying a start fee per video.

Input

Field	What it does
YouTube videos, Shorts, channels or playlists	Anything from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..., youtu.be/..., /shorts/..., /live/..., a bare video ID, @handle, a channel link, a playlist link or a search results page.
Search phrases	Transcripts of the top videos YouTube shows for each phrase.
Max videos per channel, playlist or search	Cap per source. Channels go newest first. Default 200.
Preferred languages	Language codes in order, such as en, es, pt-BR. Human captions beat auto captions in the same language. If none match, you get the video's own language and the message field says so.
Translate when my language is missing	Ask YouTube for an automatic translation into your first language. YouTube sometimes refuses; those videos still come back in the original language, flagged.
Caption type	Any (human first), human only, or auto only.
Channel tabs	Videos, Shorts and/or Live streams when you paste a channel.
Include timestamped segments / SRT / description	Extra fields for each video.
Advanced: max videos in total, videos at once, residential fallback, proxy	Budget cap and speed. The defaults suit almost every run.

Already using another transcript actor through the API? Inputs with videoUrl, videoUrls, startUrls, youtube_url, channel_url, targetLanguage or language work here unchanged.

Output

One row per video:

{
  "video_id": "aircAruvnKk",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "status": "ok",
  "message": null,
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channel_name": "3Blue1Brown",
  "channel_id": "UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw",
  "duration_seconds": 1120,
  "view_count": 24519867,
  "language": "en",
  "language_name": "English",
  "caption_type": "manual",
  "translated_to": null,
  "available_languages": ["ar", "bn", "cs", "de", "el", "en", "en (auto)", "..."],
  "word_count": 3357,
  "segment_count": 286,
  "text": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels, ...",
  "segments": [{"start": 4.22, "duration": 1.18, "text": "This is a 3."}, "..."],
  "description": "What are the neurons, why are there layers, and what is the math underlying it? ...",
  "source": "https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown",
  "charged": true,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-28T12:00:00Z"
}

status is one of ok, no_transcript, music_only, no_matching_type, age_restricted, private, unavailable, live or blocked, and message explains it in plain words. Only ok rows are charged. Add srt with the SRT option.

Tips for bigger runs

• Put a whole channel in one run. Paste the @handle and set the per-source limit to the channel size; the start fee is paid once.
• Pick the channel tabs you need. Channels list Videos, Shorts and Live streams separately; tick all three to get everything a channel posted.
• Duplicates are removed automatically, so overlapping channels, playlists and searches cost nothing extra.
• Schedule a channel daily with a small limit (say 10) to collect each new video's transcript as it appears.
• Leave "Videos at once" at 5. Higher is faster on big channels but makes YouTube push back more often.

Scheduling and integrations

Save a task with your channels and run it on an Apify schedule, then send each run to Google Sheets, a webhook, Make, Zapier or your vector database through Apify's integrations. From your own code:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/oski~youtube-transcript-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk", "@veritasium"], "maxVideosPerSource": 20}'

The sync endpoint waits up to 5 minutes. For big runs, start the run with /runs and read the dataset when it finishes.

If something looks wrong

The status line at the end of every run explains anything that came back without a transcript. The common messages:

Message	What to do
Input problem: ...	Something in the input needs changing, and the message says what. The run stopped before anything was charged.
Channel ... was not found	Check the handle (for example @mkbhd) or paste the channel link from your browser.
Searched YouTube for "..." because it is not a link	You typed words into the links box. That's fine, but put phrases under Search phrases next time.
N videos had no captions	The creator did not add captions and YouTube made no auto captions. Nothing to fetch, not charged.
N videos were age-restricted	YouTube only shows these to signed-in adults. Not charged.
N videos were refused by YouTube	Rare: every IP we tried was turned away. Run those links again later. Not charged.
No en captions; this is the original ko transcript	The video has no captions in your language. Turn on Translate to ask YouTube for a translation.

Still stuck? Open an issue on the actor page with the run link and it gets looked at quickly.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube account or API key? No. It reads the same public captions YouTube shows under any video, with no login and no quota.

Which videos have transcripts? Most videos with speech have automatic captions in their spoken language. Many also have human captions, often in several languages. Music-only videos and very new uploads sometimes have none.

Is auto-caption text accurate? It is YouTube's speech recognition: good for search and summaries, with occasional misheard words and little punctuation. Choose "Human captions only" when accuracy matters more than coverage.

Can I get a language the video was not captioned in? Turn on Translate. YouTube's automatic translation is used when it agrees; when it refuses, you still get the original transcript, flagged in the message field.

Is it legal? The actor reads captions YouTube publishes to everyone. You are responsible for how you use them, including copyright and YouTube's terms. Transcripts belong to their creators.

What if it breaks? Open an issue on the actor page and it gets fixed fast. Every row carries a status and a plain message, so a problem shows up in your data instead of as silently empty rows.

Other scrapers from Oski

• Telegram Channel Scraper: posts, views and media from public Telegram channels.
• Google Ads Transparency Scraper and Facebook Ad Library Scraper: the ads a creator or brand is running.
• Website Contact Finder: business emails and phones from any website.
• LinkedIn Jobs Scraper: job listings with salaries and full descriptions.