Youtube Transcript Scraper

Extract clean, timestamped transcripts from any public YouTube video as structured JSON — built for AI agents, RAG pipelines, and LLM workflows, and just as useful for SEO, content repurposing, and research.

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Overview

YouTube Transcript Scraper pulls the full transcript of a YouTube video, segmented by timestamp, and returns it as clean, structured JSON — no HTML scraping, no manual copy-pasting, no fighting YouTube's UI.

It's built for two audiences:

• Developers and AI builders feeding video content into a RAG pipeline, a chatbot's knowledge base, an LLM fine-tuning set, or an autonomous agent that needs to "watch" a video without watching it.
• Content teams and researchers repurposing video into blog posts, generating subtitles, or pulling searchable text out of hours of video for SEO and content audits.

Works with any public YouTube video that has captions enabled (auto-generated or manually uploaded), in the language you request.

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Why use this Actor

• Clean, structured JSON — every transcript segment comes with a start time, duration, and text, ready to parse programmatically. No regex-scraping raw captions.
• Built for AI agents and RAG — the output shape is designed to be dropped straight into a vector store, a LangChain/LlamaIndex loader, or an LLM prompt.
• Timestamp-accurate — every line keeps its original start/duration, so you can cite, seek, or resegment by any chunk size you need.
• Language selectable — request the transcript in a specific language (see targetLanguage below) instead of whatever YouTube defaults to.
• Fast — a full transcript typically returns in seconds.
• No browser or API keys needed on your side — just a video URL.

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Use cases

• RAG and AI agent pipelines: index video transcripts as a knowledge source, or let an agent call this Actor as a tool to answer "what does this video say about X?"
• Content repurposing: turn a video into a blog post, newsletter, or social clips script.
• SEO: publish transcripts alongside video embeds to make video content indexable and searchable by Google.
• Research and analysis: pull text from interviews, lectures, or talks for qualitative analysis at scale.
• Accessibility and localization: generate a base for subtitles/captions in a target language.

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Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
videoUrl	String	Yes	Full URL of the YouTube video to transcribe. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID.
targetLanguage	String (ISO 639-1)	Yes	Language code for the returned transcript (e.g. en, es, pt, fr, de, ja...). Defaults to en.

Example input

{
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
  "targetLanguage": "en"
}

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Output

Each run pushes one dataset item: an object containing the ordered list of transcript segments for the requested video. Every segment has:

Field	Type	Description
start	String	Segment start time, in seconds.
dur	String	Segment duration, in seconds.
text	String	The spoken text for that segment.

Example output

{
  "data": [
    { "start": "0.280", "dur": "4.440", "text": "I'm Dr Orion terban and this is psyx" },
    { "start": "2.960", "dur": "4.680", "text": "Better Living Through psychology and the" },
    { "start": "4.720", "dur": "5.879", "text": "topic of today's short talk is make her" }
  ]
}

Here's a real sample pulled straight from a live run, shown as a table for a quick visual check of the output shape:

start	dur	text
0.280	4.440	I'm Dr Orion terban and this is psyx
2.960	4.680	Better Living Through psychology and the
4.720	5.879	topic of today's short talk is make her
7.640	6.320	work for it so you've probably heard the
10.599	5.600	fact that women disproportionately end
13.960	4.640	relationships like they break up and

Results are available from the Output/Storage tab as JSON, CSV, Excel, or a rendered table — or via the Apify API/SDK, same as any Actor dataset.

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Integrating programmatically (API, SDKs, AI agents)

This Actor is a regular Apify Actor, so it's callable from any language via the Apify API, the official SDKs, or as a tool for AI agents through the Apify MCP Server — no custom scraping code required on your end.

JavaScript (apify-client)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' });

const run = await client.actor('pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper').call({
  videoUrl: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID',
  targetLanguage: 'en',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items[0].data); // [{ start, dur, text }, ...]

Python (apify-client)

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(run_input={
    "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
    "targetLanguage": "en",
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["data"])

For AI agents: this Actor can be exposed as a callable tool through Apify's MCP Server, so an agent (Claude, GPT, or any MCP-compatible assistant) can fetch a transcript on demand as part of answering a question or building a RAG index — without you writing a scraper.

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How to use

1. Set the input — provide videoUrl (required) and targetLanguage (defaults to en), either in the Apify Console or via an API call.
2. Run the Actor — start it from the Console, schedule it, or trigger it via the API/SDK.
3. Read the output — pull the transcript from the dataset in JSON, CSV, table view, or programmatically via the API.

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SEO benefits

Publishing transcripts alongside your video content helps you:

• Boost keyword density naturally, using the exact language spoken in the video.
• Make video content crawlable — search engines can't "watch" a video, but they can index a transcript.
• Improve accessibility — provide a text alternative for viewers who prefer reading or need it for accessibility reasons.

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Limitations

• Works only with public YouTube videos that have captions/transcripts enabled (auto-generated or manual).
• Private, restricted, or caption-less videos are not supported.
• Processes one video per run — for a playlist or channel, run it once per video URL (e.g. in a loop or a batch of Actor calls).

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Pricing

This Actor is billed via the Apify platform's usage-based pricing. See the pricing panel at the top of this page for current rates.

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FAQ

Does this work for all YouTube videos? No — only public videos that have captions/transcripts enabled.

Can I scrape private videos? No, private or restricted videos aren't supported due to YouTube's own restrictions.

Can I get the transcript in a language other than the video's original audio? If YouTube provides (or auto-translates) captions in that language, yes — set targetLanguage to the ISO 639-1 code you want.

Is this compatible with playlists or full channels? Not directly in one run — this Actor processes a single video URL at a time. Loop over video URLs (e.g. from a playlist scraper) to cover a whole playlist or channel.

Can I use this with LangChain, an AI agent, or a RAG pipeline? Yes — the output is plain structured JSON with timestamped segments, and the Actor is callable via the Apify API/SDKs or as an agent tool through Apify's MCP Server.

Related Actor

Need macro/economic context to pair with your video insights? Check out Economic Calendar Data (Investing.com) — structured economic calendar events (actual, forecast, previous values, importance ratings) across 45+ countries, built for the same algo-trading and AI-agent use cases. From the same developer, Pinto Studio.

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Start using YouTube Transcript Scraper today to turn any video into searchable, structured, agent-ready text. 🚀