🚀 Ultimate YouTube Scraper: Video, Search, Subtitles, Channels & Playlists (Fast & Ultra-Low Cost)

A highly optimized, production-grade YouTube Scraper engineered to extract deep metadata, search queries, channel lists, playlists, and full transcripts/subtitles. It is designed to maximize speed, ensure bypasses against anti-bot triggers, and operate on an ultra-low memory budget to save you up to 80% on cloud compute fees.

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💡 Why Choose This YouTube Scraper? (Key Advantages)

Unlike other heavy, browser-only scrapers on the market that easily crash or consume massive amounts of RAM, this actor is designed for maximum business utility and cost efficiency.

Feature / Advantage	🚀 This Scraper	❌ Generic Scrapers	Your Benefit
Minimum RAM Requirement	256 MB	1 GB - 2 GB	Save ~80% on platform compute costs.
Hybrid Execution Engine	Yes (HTTP + Playwright)	No (Browser Only)	Fast queries bypass slow page renders.
Absolute Epoch Timestamps	Yes (interpolatedTimestamp)	No (Vague relative dates)	Ready-to-use data for time-series and AI.
Robust Subtitle Downloader	Yes (SRT, VTT, TXT, JSON)	No or Limited	Instant text corpus for LLMs and NLP training.
Targeted Geo & Language	Yes (gl and hl control)	No (Forced English/US)	Get localized search order and original language titles.
Duplication Guard	Yes (Automated Deduplication)	No	No wasted storage; you pay only for unique data.
Auto V8 Garbage Collection	Yes (Container Safe)	No	Eliminates Out-Of-Memory (OOM) failures mid-job.

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🏗️ Technical Architecture

The scraper implements a smart multi-stage dispatch pipeline to execute high-throughput extraction while keeping resources low.

graph TD
    A[Input JSON Config] --> B{Task Distributor}
    B -- "Search Query / Search URL" --> C[HTTP InnerTube API - Ultra Fast]
    B -- "Channel Handle / Playlist URL" --> D[Playwright Stealth Browser]
    C --> E[Video IDs & Search Metadata]
    D --> E
    E --> F[Stage 2: Deep Watch Page Extraction]
    F --> G[Extract InnerTube Player Details: Views, Likes, Description]
    F --> H[Extract Captions / Subtitles if enabled]
    G --> I[Relational Timestamp Interpolator]
    H --> J[Compile Dataset Item]
    I --> J
    J --> K[Push to Apify Dataset]
    K --> L[V8 Garbage Collection Memory Cleanup]

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🎯 Business Use Cases & Value Drivers

This tool is more than just a scraper; it is a pipeline feeder for critical data operations:

• 🧠 AI & LLM Training: Extract clean video transcripts/subtitles (available in multiple formats) and video details to compile datasets for natural language processing, summarization, and custom AI agents.
• 📊 Market & Trend Monitoring: Analyze video views, likes, upload dates, and engagement velocities to identify emerging viral trends before they peak.
• 🕵️ Competitor & Brand Intelligence: Track brand mentions, monitor competitor channel uploads, and analyze video tags and descriptions to optimize your own YouTube SEO.
• 🤝 Influencer Marketing: Search for target keywords to find high-performing creators, analyze their subscriber-to-like engagement ratios, and export lists for partnership outreach.

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⚙️ Full Configuration Parameters

The Actor accepts a comprehensive JSON configuration, allowing you to fine-tune the scraping behavior to balance depth, speed, and cost.

🔍 Main Targets & Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	array	[]	List of search keywords or phrases to query.
startUrls	array	[]	Direct YouTube URLs to scrape (supports Videos, Channel URLs, or Playlist URLs).
channelHandles	array	[]	Channel handles (e.g. @SpaceX, UC3xY...) to fetch uploads from.

📊 Results & Limits

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxResults	integer	50	Maximum standard video results to collect per query/channel/playlist source.
maxResultsShorts	integer	0	Maximum YouTube Shorts results to scrape per source.
maxResultStreams	integer	0	Maximum YouTube Live Streams to scrape per source.
concurrencyLimit	integer	3	Parallel scraping workers to run concurrently (increases speed).
batchSize	integer	1	Number of items to batch together before flushing to dataset storage.

🛠️ Filtering & Sorting

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
sortingOrder	string	"relevance"	Sort search results: relevance, popularity (views), uploadDate, or rating.
dateFilter	string	"any"	Upload date filter: any, hour, today, thisWeek, thisMonth, thisYear.
lengthFilter	string	"any"	Video duration filter: any, under4 (mins), between420 (4-20 mins), over20 (mins).
features	string	"any"	Special features filter: any, live, 4k, hd, subtitles, creativeCommons, 3d, hdr.
sortVideosBy	string	"NEWEST"	Sort channel tab videos: NEWEST, OLDEST, POPULAR.
oldestPostDate	string	""	Optional ISO date limit. Stop scraping if video is older than this date (e.g., "2025-01-01").
useQueryExpansion	boolean	false	Enable to expand query terms for broader, semantic search coverage.

💬 Subtitles & Localisation

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
downloadSubtitles	boolean	false	Set to true to extract full transcripts.
subtitlesFormat	string	"srt"	Subtitle output format: srt, vtt, txt, json.
preferAutoGeneratedSubtitles	boolean	false	Fallback to auto-translated/auto-generated transcripts if manual ones are missing.
saveSubsToKVS	boolean	false	Store heavy transcript text files to Apify Key-Value Store instead of inline Dataset items to save file space.
hl	string	"en"	Host Language code (e.g., ko, ja, es). Forces YouTube to return data in specific translations.
gl	string	"US"	Geographical localization country code (e.g., KR, JP, FR). Influences search rankings and trend relevance.

🌐 System & Bypasses

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
usePlaywright	boolean	false	Force browser automation for all tasks (Warning: increases RAM consumption).
channelTab	string	"videos"	Channel tab to scrape: videos, shorts, streams, playlists, community, about.
proxyConfiguration	object	{"useApifyProxy": true}	Proxy configuration details. Residential proxies are highly recommended.

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📦 Output Dataset Schema

Each item pushed to the Apify dataset represents a detailed video report:

{
  "id": "R8m3G1E4s-g",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8m3G1E4s-g",
  "title": "SpaceX Starship Test Flight 4 Launch",
  "description": "Watch SpaceX launch Starship Flight 4 from Starbase, Texas...",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R8m3G1E4s-g/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "channelName": "SpaceX",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceX",
  "channelId": "UC3xYfSxxxxxxx",
  "channelSubscriberCount": "15.4M subscribers",
  "lengthSeconds": 3600,
  "viewCount": 2450000,
  "likes": 120000,
  "publishedDate": "2026-06-25T12:00:00.000Z",
  "publishedTimeText": "2 days ago",
  "interpolatedTimestamp": 1744027200000,
  "badges": ["4K", "CC"],
  "keywords": ["space", "rocket", "starship"],
  "transcript": "[00:01] Welcome back...\n[00:10] Starship is fully fueled...",
  "subtitlesLanguage": "en"
}

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🚀 Get Started

Run via Apify Client (Node.js SDK)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

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

const run = await client.actor('your-username/youtube-search-scraper').call({
    searchQueries: ["Generative AI Trends"],
    maxResults: 50,
    downloadSubtitles: true,
    subtitlesFormat: "txt",
    hl: "en",
    gl: "US",
    proxyConfiguration: {
        useApifyProxy: true,
        apifyProxyGroups: ["RESIDENTIAL"]
    }
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Successfully scraped ${items.length} videos!`);

Local Development Setup

1. Clone & Install Dependencies:

   $npm install
   

2. Configure Input: Edit input.json in the root folder.
3. Run the Actor:

   $npm start
   

4. Execute Local Tests:

   $npm test
   

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🛡️ License & Disclaimers

• License: MIT Licensed. Free to customize, modify, and distribute.
• Disclaimer: This scraper is intended for research, analytics, and archiving purposes. Please utilize proxies responsibly and respect YouTube's Terms of Service.