🎬 YouTube Transcript Scraper

🚀 Extract full transcripts from any YouTube video in seconds. Timestamped segments, SRT export, and 17 metadata fields (title, channel, views, likes, upload date, tags, thumbnail) per video. No API key, no registration, no YouTube Data API quota.

The YouTube Transcript Scraper turns any YouTube URL into a structured record with the full transcript, segment timestamps, and 17 metadata fields. It handles human-authored captions and auto-generated ones across 100+ languages. Each record ships with the plain-text transcript, an SRT file for subtitle overlay, and a segment array for timestamp-precise search.

Metadata covers title, channel ID, channel name, channel URL, description, duration, view count, like count, comment count, upload date, tags, categories, thumbnail URL, and the list of all available subtitle languages. Concurrent extraction keeps 30 videos processing in parallel, so a queue of 100 clips finishes in a couple of minutes. Residential proxy is required because YouTube has cracked down hard on datacenter IPs.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
AI app developers, researchers, content creators, language learners, accessibility engineers, journalists	RAG video indexing, LLM summarization, captions datasets, language learning, accessibility tools

📋 What the YouTube Transcript Scraper does

Six transcript workflows in a single run:

• 📝 Full transcript. Timestamped segments with start, duration, and text per line.
• 💬 Plain text transcript. Flat string ready for LLM ingestion.
• 🎞️ SRT export. Standards-compliant subtitle file for video apps.
• 🌐 Language picker. Choose your preferred caption language with fallback to defaults.
• 🎬 Video metadata. Title, channel info, views, likes, comments, upload date, tags, categories.
• 🌍 Available languages. Full list of manual and auto-generated caption languages per video.

Each record also includes the thumbnail URL and an isAutoGenerated flag so you can filter out auto captions when you need human-quality transcripts.

💡 Why it matters: video is the largest untapped dataset in the world. Transcripts make it searchable, summarizable, and indexable. DIY transcript fetchers break every time YouTube changes their API. This Actor uses yt-dlp under the hood, which is actively maintained.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: author, availableLanguages, channelUrl, description, durationSeconds, isAutoGenerated, language, publishedDate, results, scrapedAt, thumbnailUrl, title, transcriptPlainText, url, videoId, viewCount, wordCount. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: YouTube now blocks datacenter IPs for transcript fetching. Apify residential proxy is included on paid plans and is strongly recommended. Videos without captions return a record with an error field explaining "No subtitles available."

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the YouTube Transcript Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Add video URLs. Paste URLs or video IDs and pick a preferred language.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor transcribe.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded transcripts: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 📺 YouTube Channel Scraper - Channel metadata and video lists
• 🎞️ YouTube Shorts Scraper - Shorts data and metadata
• 💬 YouTube Comments Scraper - Comments and replies
• 🏷️ YouTube Hashtag Scraper - Videos matching a hashtag
• 🤖 RAG Web Browser - Search the web with LLM-ready output

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more video and audio tools.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with Google, YouTube, or Alphabet. It accesses only publicly available video metadata and caption tracks. Respect YouTube's terms of service and copyright when using transcripts commercially.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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