Short Video Transcriber — TikTok, Reels & Shorts to Text, SRT

TikTok and YouTube Shorts to transcript, SRT and VTT. Native captions when they exist, Whisper when they don't.

Paste short-form video URLs, get back the words. Every video comes back as plain text, timestamped segments, a ready-to-use .srt subtitle file, a .vtt file, and the basic source metadata — author, caption, hashtags, duration, language.

The Actor reads each platform's own caption track first and only runs Whisper speech-to-text on videos that have none. That is why it is fast, and why videos with captions cost a fraction of what a transcribe-everything tool charges.

• No API key, no login, no cookies.
• 90+ languages. The transcript comes back in the video's own language by default.
• Bulk-safe. One dead link never breaks the rest of the run.
• You only pay for delivered transcripts. Failures, private videos and over-length videos are free.

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Supported platforms

Platform	Video URLs	Native captions	Whisper fallback
TikTok	tiktok.com/@user/video/123…, vm.tiktok.com/… share links	✅ creator captions and TikTok's own auto-captions	✅
YouTube Shorts	youtube.com/shorts/ID, youtu.be/ID, youtube.com/watch?v=ID	✅ creator captions and YouTube auto-captions	✅
Instagram Reels	—	—	—

Instagram Reels URLs are recognised and rejected with a clear message. Reels support ships as its own Actor; this one does not pretend to handle it.

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What you get

One dataset row per video:

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BDf5mOfSkkw",
  "platform": "youtube_shorts",
  "videoId": "BDf5mOfSkkw",
  "author": "UCUvUKGDBCqJzV4OwJkQWCHg",
  "authorName": "King Arthur Baking Company",
  "title": "The Only Sourdough Recipe You'll Ever Need",
  "hashtags": ["baking", "sourdough"],
  "durationSeconds": 15.0,
  "language": "en",
  "source": "native_captions",
  "text": "I'm going to show you how to make the only sourdough bread that you need to know…",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 0.0,  "end": 1.14, "text": "I'm going to show you how to make the" },
    { "start": 1.14, "end": 2.46, "text": "only sourdough bread that you need to" }
  ],
  "srt": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,140\nI'm going to show you how to make the\n\n2\n…",
  "vtt": "WEBVTT\n\n00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.140\nI'm going to show you how to make the\n\n…",
  "wordCount": 62,
  "segmentCount": 9,
  "isAutoGenerated": true,
  "sourceDetail": "youtube_shorts_auto_captions",
  "viewCount": 184231,
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-14T10:03:11+00:00",
  "status": "ok",
  "error": null
}

source is always exactly one of:

• native_captions — the words came from the platform's own caption track.
• whisper_asr — the video had no usable captions, so the audio was transcribed with Whisper.

The srt and vtt fields are complete, valid subtitle files. Overlapping caption cues from auto-generated tracks are trimmed, so subtitles do not double up on screen.

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How it works

For every URL:

1. Identify the platform and reject anything that is not a single short-form video, with a specific reason.
2. Resolve the video — title, author, hashtags, duration, view count.
3. Check the duration against your cap before doing anything expensive.
4. Try native captions. If the platform has a usable track, normalise it into text, timed segments, SRT and VTT. Charged as caption_transcript.
5. Otherwise download the audio and run Whisper (faster-whisper, CPU, int8). Charged as asr_transcript.

A video is charged for exactly one of those two events, after the row is written — never both, never before.

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Pricing

Event	Price	When it fires
caption_transcript	$0.002	A transcript was produced from the platform's native captions.
asr_transcript	$0.040	A transcript was produced by Whisper because there were no captions.
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event, charged once per gigabyte of the run's memory. This Actor runs at 2 GB, so $0.0001 per run.

Those are the Free-plan prices. Apify's paid plans get its standard Store discount off every event — Bronze 5 %, Silver 10 %, Gold and above 15 % — so asr_transcript costs $0.038, $0.036 or $0.034 on those plans and caption_transcript costs $0.0019, $0.0018 or $0.0017.

Whisper costs about a second of CPU for every 1.5 seconds of audio, which is why it is priced twenty times the caption rate. Most videos never touch it.

Nothing else is charged. In particular you are not charged for:

• videos that are deleted, private, region-locked or age-restricted;
• videos longer than your maxDurationSeconds cap;
• caption-less videos longer than maxAsrDurationSeconds (they return ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED);
• videos where Whisper finds no speech at all (music-only clips);
• malformed URLs or unsupported platforms;
• any run that fails.

What a run actually costs

Caption availability is what moves the bill. On short-form video it varies a lot by niche — talking-head, educational and news content is largely captioned; dance, music and meme content often is not.

1,000 videos	Cost
All have captions	$2.00
90 % captions / 10 % Whisper	$5.80
70 % captions / 30 % Whisper	$13.40
None have captions	$40.00

(Free-plan prices; a Gold plan pays 15 % less than each of these.)

Turn "Transcribe with Whisper when there are no captions" off to cap the price at $0.002 per video: caption-less videos then return a CAPTIONS_UNAVAILABLE error, free of charge, and you can decide what to do with them.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
videoUrls	array	—	Required. TikTok video URLs and YouTube Shorts URLs.
language	string	(blank)	Two-letter code (en, es, pt…). Blank keeps the video's own language — usually what you want for a transcript. Setting it selects that language's caption track when the platform offers one (which may be a translation) and tells Whisper what to expect.
allowWhisperFallback	boolean	true	Off = captions only, and caption-less videos cost nothing.
maxDurationSeconds	integer	600	Videos longer than this are skipped, free. Max 1200.
maxAsrDurationSeconds	integer	180	Length limit for the Whisper path only. Caption-less videos longer than this return ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED, free. Captioned videos are unaffected.
maxVideos	integer	1000	Safety cap on the number of URLs processed.
forceWhisper	boolean	false	Transcribe with Whisper even when captions exist. Charged at the asr_transcript rate.
whisperModel	string	base	tiny, base or small. Only affects the Whisper fallback.
beamSize	integer	1	Whisper decoding beam width.
concurrency	integer	5	Videos resolved in parallel. Whisper always runs one at a time.
includeFailedItems	boolean	true	Keep a row (with an error code) for every failure, so inputs reconcile to outputs.
useResidentialFallback	boolean	true	Retries through a residential IP when a platform answers the normal proxy with a bot check. YouTube needs this.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Recommended. Used for the first attempt on every request.

Minimal input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7189113838831488302",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BDf5mOfSkkw"
  ]
}

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Run it

In the Apify Console

Open the Actor, paste your URLs into Video URLs, one per line, and click Start. Results appear in the dataset and can be exported as JSON, CSV, XLSX or Excel — or you can download the srt column straight into a subtitle file.

API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~short-video-transcriber/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "videoUrls": [
          "https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7189113838831488302",
          "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BDf5mOfSkkw"
        ],
        "maxDurationSeconds": 600
      }'

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('YOUR_USERNAME/short-video-transcriber').call({
    videoUrls: [
        'https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7189113838831488302',
        'https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BDf5mOfSkkw',
    ],
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

for (const item of items) {
    if (item.status !== 'ok') {
        console.warn(`${item.inputUrl}: ${item.error}`);
        continue;
    }
    console.log(`${item.author} (${item.source}): ${item.text}`);
    // Save subtitles next to your video files:
    // await fs.writeFile(`${item.videoId}.srt`, item.srt);
}

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("YOUR_USERNAME/short-video-transcriber").call(input={
    "videoUrls": [
        "https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7189113838831488302",
        "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BDf5mOfSkkw",
    ],
    "allowWhisperFallback": True,
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["status"] != "ok":
        print(f"{item['inputUrl']}: {item['error']} — {item['errorMessage']}")
        continue
    print(item["author"], item["language"], item["wordCount"], "words")
    with open(f"{item['videoId']}.srt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as handle:
        handle.write(item["srt"])

n8n, Make and Zapier

The Actor works with the standard Apify → Run Actor node in n8n and the Apify → Run an Actor module in Make. Point the node at this Actor, pass videoUrls as the input JSON, then read the dataset items in the next step — text for the transcript, srt for a subtitle file, error to branch on failures.

A common shape: a spreadsheet or webhook supplies URLs → this Actor returns transcripts → an LLM node summarises, translates or tags them → the result is written back. Because failures come back as rows with an error field rather than as a broken run, a filter on status == "ok" is all the error handling most workflows need.

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Errors

Failed videos get a dataset row with status: "error", an error code and a plain-English errorMessage. They are never charged.

Code	Meaning
VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE	Deleted, never existed, or region-locked.
VIDEO_PRIVATE	Private, friends-only or followers-only.
DURATION_EXCEEDED	Longer than maxDurationSeconds.
ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED	No captions, and longer than maxAsrDurationSeconds. Raise that limit to transcribe it anyway.
CAPTIONS_UNAVAILABLE	No native captions and the Whisper fallback is turned off.
NO_SPEECH_DETECTED	Whisper found no speech — a music-only or silent video.
UNSUPPORTED_PLATFORM	Not a TikTok or YouTube Shorts URL.
INVALID_URL	Not a link to a single video (a profile or channel URL, for example).
MEDIA_UNAVAILABLE	The audio could not be downloaded for transcription.
BLOCKED / RATE_LIMITED	The platform refused the request. Try again, ideally with a proxy.
MEMORY_LIMIT	The video does not fit in the run's memory for the chosen model. Raise the memory or pick a smaller model.

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Limits and good to know

• Short-form only. The default cap is 600 seconds and the maximum is 1200. For podcasts, webinars and long YouTube videos, use a general-purpose transcriber instead.
• Memory. Run with at least 2 GB. That covers the whole duration range with the base model; the Actor refuses an impossible combination up front instead of being killed mid-run.
• Auto-generated captions are auto-generated. When a transcript comes from a platform's own ASR track (isAutoGenerated: true), it carries that track's mistakes. For the highest accuracy on a specific video, turn captions off in your workflow and let Whisper do it — or use the small model.
• Public videos only. No login, no cookies, no private content.
• Caption availability changes. Platforms backfill captions hours after upload, so the same video can take the Whisper path today and the caption path tomorrow.
• Leave the residential retry on for YouTube. YouTube refuses datacenter IPs outright ("Sign in to confirm you're not a bot"). The Actor retries those requests through a residential IP automatically; with useResidentialFallback off, YouTube Shorts return LOGIN_REQUIRED. TikTok does not need it.
• Whisper is length-limited; captions are not. A caption-less video is transcribed up to maxAsrDurationSeconds (180 s by default — the length of the longest YouTube Short, and longer than the overwhelming majority of TikToks). Past that, Whisper's cost outgrows a per-video price, so the video returns ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED and costs you nothing. Raise the limit if you want those anyway. Videos with captions run to the full maxDurationSeconds at the $0.002 rate, whatever their length.

What this Actor does not do

It transcribes videos. It does not scrape comments, profiles, followers or hashtags, does not monitor accounts, and does not summarise, translate or analyse sentiment — pipe the transcript into an LLM step for that.

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Related searches

video to text · video transcript · transcribe video · TikTok transcript · TikTok to text · YouTube Shorts transcript · Shorts to text · caption extractor · subtitle downloader · SRT generator · VTT subtitles · speech to text · Whisper transcription