🎬 YouTube Full Channel Transcripts Extractor

Extract every transcript from an entire YouTube channel — videos, shorts, streams/lives, podcasts, even playlists — with just a link. Get clean, structured captions alongside rich video & channel metadata, ready to download as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Give it @handle, a channel ID, a channel URL, or a playlist link and it crawls the whole thing, pulling transcripts in the format you choose — plain text, timestamped text, SRT, VTT, TTML, JSON3, srv1/2/3 or SBV.

🌟 Why Choose This Actor?

• ⚡ Bulk by design — drop in many channels/playlists at once and scrape them in one run.
• 🧾 13 transcript formats — from a simple text array to broadcast-ready SRT/VTT.
• 🧷 Pick your fields — toggle channel and video metadata on/off to keep results lean.
• 🛡️ Self-healing proxies — starts direct, then auto-falls-back to datacenter and sticky residential proxies if YouTube pushes back.
• 💾 Live results — every video is saved the moment it's ready, so a long run never loses progress.
• 📊 Organized output — four ready-made dataset views (Transcripts, Video Metadata, Channel Info, Full Records).

✨ Key Features

• Works with videos, shorts, streams/lives, podcasts and playlists.
• Dynamic, deployment-proof extraction (no hardcoded keys that rot when YouTube updates).
• Retries with backoff on blocks/timeouts.
• Comment counts, like counts, view counts, publish dates, thumbnails, keywords and full channel stats.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
urls	array	Required. Channel/playlist links, @handles or IDs — one per line.
url	string	Optional single source (for convenience).
outputFormat	string	Transcript format (captions, srt, vtt, json3, …).
maxVideos	integer	Max videos per source (0 = all).
*Boolean	boolean	Toggle each channel/video metadata field.
maxRetries	integer	Retries per blocked request.
maxScrollRetries	integer	Retries while paginating the channel.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings (fallback ladder applies automatically).

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@Vexento/shorts"],
  "outputFormat": "captions",
  "maxVideos": 50,
  "channelNameBoolean": true,
  "viewCountBoolean": true,
  "likesBoolean": true,
  "commentsBoolean": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

📤 Output

Each item is one video:

{
  "videoId": "MdRB7mX9iWI",
  "title": "Do you guys think Cloudy approves?…",
  "channelName": "Vexento",
  "channelHandle": "@Vexento",
  "channelID": "UCYZ9rknEmE4R1J_HBJ2yBlQ",
  "subscriberCount": "513K subscribers",
  "datePublished": "2026-05-05T16:15:44.000Z",
  "viewCount": "5,012 views",
  "likes": "262",
  "comments": "55",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MdRB7mX9iWI/maxres2.jpg",
  "captions": ["[music]", ">> It's cute.", "Do you approve or not?"]
}

🚀 How to Use (Apify Console)

1. Log in at console.apify.com → Actors.
2. Open YouTube Full Channel Transcripts Extractor.
3. Paste your channel / playlist links, pick a format and metadata fields.
4. Click Start and watch the live log fill up.
5. Open the Output tab — switch between the Transcripts, Video Metadata, Channel Info and Full Records views.
6. Export to JSON / CSV / XLSX.

🤖 Use via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<ACTOR_ID>/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["https://www.youtube.com/@Vexento/shorts"],"outputFormat":"captions","maxVideos":25}'

💡 Best Use Cases

• Build searchable text databases from entire channels.
• Repurpose video content into blogs, articles and social snippets.
• Feed transcripts into NLP / LLM pipelines.
• Accessibility and study aids from educational content.

💳 Pricing

Billed per scraped video record (pay-per-event). Runs that hit your spend limit stop cleanly, keeping everything already collected.

❓ FAQ

Can I scrape multiple channels at once? Yes — add as many links to urls as you want.

What if YouTube blocks me? The actor automatically escalates from a direct connection to a datacenter proxy, then to a sticky residential proxy, retrying along the way.

Which formats are supported? captions, textWithTimestamps, xmlWithoutTimestamps, xmlWithTimestamps, singleStringText, srt, ttml, vtt, json3, srv3, srv2, srv1, sbv.

🛟 Support

Only publicly available data is collected. You are responsible for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable laws (GDPR/CCPA, etc.).