YouTube Transcript Scraper

Get the transcripts of YouTube videos, Shorts and a channel's latest videos, with each video's title, channel, views and length.

Pick a language, or get each video in the language spoken in it. Turn on timestamps to get every line with its start and end. Videos without captions are free.

$2 per 1,000 transcripts.

What it's for

• AI agents and LLM pipelines: clean text to summarize, classify, embed or feed to RAG.
• Content research: hooks, scripts and talking points of the channels in your niche, as text you can search.
• Repurposing: turn your own videos into posts, newsletters, blog drafts or subtitles.
• Study and research: lectures, talks and interviews as text, with timestamps to cite.

Input

Field	What it does
videoUrls	Video or Shorts URLs (youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, /shorts/, /live/) or video IDs, one per line
channels	Channel URLs or @handles, one per line
maxVideosPerChannel	Videos per channel, newest first (default 10)
language	A code like en, es or pt-BR. Videos without captions in it come in the language spoken in them
timestamps	Adds segments: each line with its start and end, in seconds

Inputs saved for other YouTube transcript actors carry over: youtube_url, channel_url, max_videos, languages and startUrls work too.

Output

One row per video:

{
  "input": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU",
  "videoId": "arj7oStGLkU",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU",
  "title": "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED",
  "channelName": "TED",
  "channelId": "UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
  "duration": 844,
  "viewCount": 62109477,
  "description": "Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn't make sense…",
  "language": "en",
  "autoGenerated": false,
  "transcript": "So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write…",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 12.645, "end": 14.015, "text": "So in college," },
    { "start": 15.349, "end": 16.913, "text": "I was a government major," }
  ]
}

autoGenerated is true for YouTube's automatic captions and false for captions written by people. segments comes only with timestamps on. A video without captions comes with an empty transcript and language set to null.

Videos and channels that can't be read get a row with the reason, free of charge:

{ "input": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx", "error": "Private video" }

Price

• $0.002 per transcript
• Videos without captions: free
• Private, missing or invalid videos and channels: free

Run	Cost
1,000 videos	$2
A channel's 100 latest videos	$0.20

A run stops at the maximum cost you set for it. On Apify's free plan, a run reads up to 100 videos.

FAQ

Which videos have captions? Almost every video with someone talking: YouTube captions them automatically. Many also have captions written by people, which come first.

Which languages? Any language a video has captions in. Leave language empty to get the one spoken in each video. It doesn't translate: when a video has no captions in your language, you get the spoken one, and language says which. Captions made for a video's dubbed audio come only when you ask for their language.

How long can a video be? Any length. The transcript covers the whole video.

Shorts and live streams? Shorts work like any video. A live stream has a transcript once it has ended and YouTube has captioned it.

Does it work with private, members-only or age-restricted videos? No. Only public videos.

Is it legal? It reads only public videos. Names and voices are personal data under GDPR and similar laws: use them for a legitimate purpose and honor deletion requests.