Fast YouTube Transcript Scraper - Subtitles & Timestamps

High-speed YouTube video subtitle and transcript extractor. Fetch time-stamped text chunks, total word counts, and language codes on 256MB RAM.

Unlike conventional scrapers running heavy headless browsers (Puppeteer/Playwright eating 1–2 GB of RAM that frequently crash and time out), Fast YouTube Transcript Scraper runs on ultra-lightweight 256 MB RAM micro-containers using direct HTTP/2 requests with TLS session emulation — running 10x faster at 90% lower compute cost.

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⚡ Compute Cost & Efficiency (Why Choose This Scraper?)

• Super Cheap: Runs in ~200ms per video using direct subtitle tracks. Zero Chromium memory footprint.
• Run on Apify Free Tier: Apify gives you $5 free credits every month. Because this scraper only consumes 256MB RAM and executes in seconds, you can perform thousands of runs every month completely free.
• 100% Cloud Stability: Zero browser overhead means no Chromium memory leaks, no zombie processes, and 99.9% run success rates.

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🚀 Key Features

• Full Transcripts with Timestamps: Start time, duration, and text chunk for every spoken line.
• Multiple Languages: Supports auto-generated captions and officially uploaded subtitles in all available languages.
• Clean Formats: Output as structured JSON chunks, continuous raw text, or standard SRT subtitle files.
• Word & Reading Time Analytics: Calculates total word count and estimated reading time.

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💡 Use Cases & Applications

• AI Video Summaries: Feed clean video transcripts into LLMs (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini) to generate bullet summaries.
• SEO Blog Post Creation: Repurpose spoken YouTube video content into long-form SEO blog articles and guides.
• Content Search & Retrieval: Search specific keywords across hundreds of video transcripts in seconds.

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🔌 No-Code Integrations (Make.com, Zapier, n8n & Webhooks)

This Actor connects seamlessly with your favorite automation and CRM tools to run scheduled workflows or sync data automatically:

1. Make.com Integration

1. Add an Apify module in Make.com and choose "Run an Actor".
2. Select RBBscrap/fast-youtube-transcript-scraper and pass your desired inputs.
3. Add a "Watch Dataset Items" module to receive extracted items.
4. Route the clean JSON data straight into Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, or Slack.

2. n8n Integration

1. Use the n8n Apify Node or a generic HTTP Request Node.
2. Set execution mode to asynchronous and pass your Apify API Token.
3. Automatically append clean records into PostgreSQL, Supabase, or HubSpot.

3. Webhooks & REST API

Call this scraper via a single HTTP POST request from Python, Node.js, cURL, or PHP:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/rbbscrap~fast-youtube-transcript-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"maxItems": 50}'

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📊 Sample Output Data

{
  "videoId": "5kcaHAuGxmY",
  "language": "en",
  "totalWords": 3420,
  "fullText": "Welcome to this complete guide on high performance web scraping...",
  "chunks": [
    {
      "start": 0.5,
      "duration": 2.3,
      "text": "Welcome to this complete guide"
    }
  ]
}

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🔍 Search Keywords & Long-Tail Indexing

youtube transcript scraper, download youtube subtitles srt, youtube captions to text, video transcription for llm, youtube summary ai pipeline, transcribe youtube video without api

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💬 Support, Custom Scrapers & Feedback

Need a tailored scraper, higher volume capacity, custom proxies, or new data fields?

• Contact: hector.lebrun78@gmail.com
• Response Time: Usually within 24 hours.

Star / bookmark this Actor if you find it helpful! Positive feedback helps us maintain and update endpoints regularly.