YouTube Transcript Scraper — Subtitles & Captions

What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper extracts structured data from YouTube and delivers it as clean JSON — no proxies, browsers or anti-bot handling on your side. It is a practical YouTube API alternative for teams who need YouTube data on a schedule rather than a one-off export.

It covers 2 different YouTube surfaces behind a single Mode dropdown, so one Actor replaces a rack of single-purpose scrapers.

Why scrape YouTube?

• Every surface in one place — pick a mode, fill two fields, run.
• Anti-bot handled upstream — residential proxy rotation, TLS and browser fingerprinting, and CAPTCHA solving happen inside the ScrapeBadger API.
• Pay per call, not per row — a page of results costs the same as one lookup, so bulk work stays cheap.
• Runs on the Apify platform — scheduling, monitoring, webhooks, the API, and integrations with Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, Slack and Airtable all work out of the box.
• Partial results are kept — a transient upstream failure ends the run cleanly instead of discarding what you already paid for.

What data can YouTube Transcript Scraper extract?

Every record is pushed to the dataset as its own row. The most useful fields are below; the full record carries considerably more.

Field	Type	Description
text	string	Text content of the record
start	number	Start
duration	number	Length in seconds
language	string	Language

YouTube scraping modes

Pick one Mode; the input form marks the fields it needs.

Mode	What it returns	Charged as
Get Transcript	Timed transcript segments; the response also carries full text, SRT and VTT.	standard-call
List Captions	Which caption tracks and translations exist for a video.	basic-call

How to scrape YouTube

1. Click Try for free and sign in to Apify.
2. Open Settings → Environment variables and add SCRAPEBADGER_API_KEY with your key from scrapebadger.com, ticking Secret.
3. Choose a Mode from the dropdown.
4. Fill in the fields that mode needs — the description on each field says which modes use it.
5. Set Max items to cap the run.
6. Press Start and watch the dataset fill up.
7. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it from the API tab.

How much will it cost to scrape YouTube?

This Actor is pay per event: one event per API call, whatever that call returns. Fetching a page of 100 records costs the same as fetching one record, so larger pages are cheaper per row.

Event	Price per event	What triggers it
basic-call	$0.0010	A cheap call — autocomplete, reference data, single lookups.
standard-call	$0.0020	A standard call — one search page, profile, or detail record.

Apify also charges its standard $0.001 actor start fee per run. ScrapeBadger credits are consumed on your own account on top of this.

Input

See the Input tab for every option with inline documentation. A minimal run looks like this:

{
  "mode": "Get Transcript",
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "max_items": 100
}

Max items caps the run; the Actor pages until it reaches that number or YouTube runs out of results.

Output

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel, or read it straight from the Apify API. Each record is one row:

{
  "text": "<text>",
  "start": 1234,
  "duration": 1234,
  "language": "<language>"
}

What can you do with YouTube data?

A few things teams actually build with this Actor.

Build a RAG corpus from video

Transcripts turn a channel's back catalogue into searchable, embeddable text. For any domain where the expertise lives in video, this is the fastest route to a knowledge base.

Repurpose video into written content

The full text plus timestamps is the raw material for blog posts, newsletters and show notes — the highest-leverage content repurposing there is.

Search across hours of video

Timed segments let you jump straight to where a topic is discussed, across an entire channel, without watching any of it.

Generate subtitles and translations

Ready-made SRT and VTT output drops straight into a video pipeline or a translation workflow.

Tips for faster, cheaper runs

• Raise the page-size field (count, limit, per_page — whichever the mode exposes) before raising Max items. Fewer, bigger calls cost less.
• Use the cheap reference and autocomplete modes to resolve IDs before spending on the expensive detail modes.
• Schedule incremental runs with a low Max items rather than one huge sweep; you get fresher data and a smaller bill.
• Chain Actors with webhooks to push new rows straight into your warehouse.

Requirements

This Actor calls the ScrapeBadger API on your behalf, so it needs your key:

1. Get one at scrapebadger.com — there is a free tier.
2. In Settings → Environment variables, add SCRAPEBADGER_API_KEY with your sb_live_… key and tick Secret.

Credits are consumed on your ScrapeBadger account in addition to the Apify event price.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to scrape YouTube?

Scraping publicly available data from YouTube is generally legal, and this Actor only ever reads pages a logged-out visitor could see. What you then do with the data is what matters — read the disclaimer below before collecting anything that could be personal data.

Do I need my own proxies?

No. Proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting and anti-bot handling all happen upstream in the ScrapeBadger API, so there is nothing to configure here.

Do I need a ScrapeBadger account?

Yes. The Actor calls the ScrapeBadger API on your behalf, so it needs your API key in the SCRAPEBADGER_API_KEY environment variable. There is a free tier at scrapebadger.com — see Requirements below.

How many results can I get in one run?

Set Max items to whatever you need. The Actor keeps paging until it hits that number or YouTube runs out of results, and stops cleanly either way.

How much does one run cost?

Events start at $0.0010 and are charged once per API call, not per row — so a page of 100 results costs the same as a single lookup. Apify adds its standard $0.001 actor start fee per run.

What happens if the run fails halfway through?

Whatever was already scraped stays in the dataset. The run ends with a status message explaining where it stopped instead of throwing your results away.

Can I run this on a schedule or from my own code?

Yes. Use the Schedules tab for recurring runs, or the API tab to start runs and read the dataset from your own application.

Is scraping YouTube reliable?

Anti-bot interstitials are a fact of life on YouTube. A blocked call is retried four times with exponential backoff against fresh exits, and if a run dies partway it keeps everything already scraped rather than throwing the dataset away. Upstream availability is monitored continuously.

Your feedback and support

Found a bug, missing a field, or need a mode that is not here? Open a ticket on the Issues tab, or email support@scrapebadger.com. The API tab has everything you need to run this Actor programmatically.

Disclaimer

Our Actors are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. We therefore believe that our Actors, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, are safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. Personal data is protected by the GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers.