YouTube Channel Transcripts Scraper — Bulk Captions

Get the transcript of every video on a YouTube channel or playlist in one run. Paste a channel handle or playlist link, choose how many videos you want, and get full text plus timestamped captions for each one — with the title, views, likes and upload date alongside.

Built for feeding AI knowledge bases, RAG pipelines, content research and SEO. No API key, no YouTube login.

What you get

For every video:

• transcript — the full caption text, one line per caption
• segments — every caption line with startMs, durationMs and text, for timestamps and clip-finding
• wordCount, language, isAutoGenerated (creator-written vs YouTube auto-captions)
• availableLanguages — the caption languages the video offers
• videoId, url, title, channelName, channelId
• uploadDate, durationSeconds, viewCount, likeCount
• source and sourceType — which channel, playlist or video the row came from
• status — success, no_captions (the video has no captions in your languages) or error

Use cases

• AI knowledge bases & RAG — load a creator's or company's whole back catalogue into your chatbot or vector database
• Content research — search what a channel has said about a topic across hundreds of videos
• Repurposing — turn a channel's videos into blog posts, newsletters or social threads
• Competitor analysis — see which topics, products and talking points a competitor covers
• Education & training — build searchable notes from course or lecture playlists
• Podcast & interview mining — pull quotes and timestamps from long-form interview channels

How to use

1. Add one or more Channels, playlists or videos, one per line:
   • @veritasium or https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium
   • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA
   • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
   • Single video or Shorts URLs
2. Set Max videos per channel / playlist (default 20; 0 = every video).
3. Pick the Channel content tab — Videos, Shorts or Live streams — and a Sort order: Latest, Most popular or Oldest.
4. Set Transcript languages in order of preference (default en).
5. Run the actor. Transcripts stream into the Dataset tab; export them as JSON, CSV, Excel or straight to Google Sheets.

Videos that appear in more than one source are processed once.

Output format

{
  "source": "@veritasium",
  "sourceType": "channel",
  "videoId": "4Wrc4fHSCpw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw",
  "title": "These are the asteroids to worry about",
  "channelName": "Veritasium",
  "channelId": "UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA",
  "uploadDate": "2020-11-30",
  "publishedText": "5 years ago",
  "durationSeconds": 1206,
  "viewCount": 80977954,
  "likeCount": 657952,
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "transcript": "- This video was sponsored by KiwiCo.\nMore about them at the end of the show.\nOn February 15th, 2013, over Chelyabinsk Russia, ...",
  "wordCount": 3252,
  "segments": [
    { "startMs": 8520, "durationMs": 2360, "text": "- This video was sponsored by KiwiCo." },
    { "startMs": 10880, "durationMs": 2153, "text": "More about them at the end of the show." }
  ],
  "availableLanguages": ["en", "zh-CN"],
  "status": "success",
  "error": null
}

Pricing

You pay per transcript delivered. Videos without captions in your languages, and videos that fail, are listed in the dataset with their status but never charged.

Tips

• For a whole channel, set Max videos to 0. Big channels take longer; if a run hits its time limit, it stops cleanly with everything fetched so far saved.
• Turn off Include timestamped segments when you only need the plain text — exports get much smaller.
• Shorts usually only have auto-generated captions; keep Prefer human-written captions on and they are still returned.

Related actors

• YouTube Transcript Scraper — transcripts for a short list of specific videos
• YouTube Video Summarizer — turn a video into a summary, chapters and a blog draft
• YouTube Channel Videos Scraper — list a channel's videos without transcripts