📺 YouTube Video Captions Scraper

YouTube Video Captions Scraper is a powerful Apify actor designed to extract and download captions (subtitles) from YouTube videos in multiple formats and languages. Whether you're analyzing content, translating captions, or just archiving subtitle data, this actor gives you structured and flexible access to caption files.

🚀 Features

• ✅ Extracts automatic captions from any public YouTube video
• ✅ Supports multiple languages and formats (.vtt, .json3, .srv1, .srv2, .srv3, .ttml)
• ✅ Returns direct download URLs for each caption format
• ✅ Includes video metadata like title, thumbnail, and original URL
• ✅ Easy to use with simple input schema

🧾 Input

The actor accepts a JSON object with a list of video URLs and optional request methods.

{
  "video_urls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLqZtded_0",
      "method": "GET"
    }
  ]
}

• url (string): A valid YouTube video URL
• method (string): Optional HTTP method for request (defaults to GET)

📤 Output

The actor returns a structured JSON object with detailed caption data:

{
  "original_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLqZtded_0",
  "title": "Maher Zain & Harris J - Qalbi Fil Madinah | Official Music Video",
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/2VLqZtded_0/maxresdefault.webp",
  "automatic_captions": {
    "af": [ { "url": "...", "ext": "vtt", "protocol": "m3u8_native" }, ... ],
    "bn": [ { "url": "...", "ext": "json3", "name": "Bangla" }, ... ]
  }
}

• original_url: The video link
• title: Video title
• thumbnail: Thumbnail URL
• automatic_captions: Object grouped by language codes (e.g. af, bn) containing an array of caption file metadata

Each caption object may include:

• url: Direct download URL
• ext: Format (vtt, json3, etc.)
• name: Language name
• protocol: (if available) like m3u8_native

📚 Use Cases

• Researching video content across languages
• Archiving or republishing captions
• Creating datasets for NLP/AI training
• Enhancing accessibility through custom captioning tools
• Translating YouTube captions programmatically

🛠️ How It Works

1. You submit one or more YouTube video URLs.
2. The actor scrapes available automatic captions.
3. The actor returns a list of formats and languages for each caption track.
4. You can download and process captions as needed using the provided URLs.

🧠 Pro Tip

Use this actor in combination with:

• YouTube Video Transcript Scraper for full transcripts

🔒 Limitations

• Only works with public YouTube videos
• Automatic captions may vary in accuracy depending on the video's language, clarity, and background noise
• Manual subtitles (user-provided) are not currently supported

📞 Need Help?

Having trouble or need a custom feature? scrapearchitect@gmail.com or open an issue on the actor page.

💡 Keywords

YouTube Video Captions Scraper, YouTube captions downloader, subtitle extractor, download YouTube subtitles, YouTube VTT JSON captions, scrape YouTube captions Apify