YouTube Transcript Scraper - Channels, Playlists & AI Chunks

🎬 What does YouTube Transcript Scraper do?

YouTube Transcript Scraper gets clean transcripts from single videos, whole channels, playlists and YouTube search results in one run, and makes them ready to use:

• 📝 Clean text plus timestamped segments (start and duration of every line)
• 🎞️ SRT and VTT subtitle files
• 🤖 AI-ready chunks: transcripts split into pieces of ~N words, each with start/end time, chapter and a link that opens the video at that moment. Perfect for RAG, embeddings, ChatGPT/Claude and AI agents
• 🔎 Find phrases across videos: every mention of a brand, topic or name, with the sentence around it and a clickable timestamp
• 📚 Chapters from the video description
• 🌍 Any language: pick your preferred languages in order; human-made captions are preferred over auto-generated ones; every video lists all caption languages it has
• 🔔 Only new videos: follow channels and get transcripts of new uploads only (schedule it daily or weekly)
• 📄 All transcripts in one Markdown file, ready to paste into an AI tool or a knowledge base
• 🏷️ Video details: title, channel, views, length, keywords, description

💸 You only pay for videos that have a transcript. Videos without captions, private or deleted videos, and failed lookups are always free.

No YouTube account, no API key, no browser.

👥 Who is it for?

• AI builders: feed YouTube knowledge into RAG pipelines, chatbots and agents
• Researchers and students: search what was said across hundreds of videos
• Marketers and brands: find every mention of your brand or competitors in YouTube videos, with links to the exact moment
• Content creators: subtitles (SRT/VTT), blog posts and show notes from videos
• Course and podcast teams: whole playlists and channels as text

🚀 How to use it

1. Add videos, channels (@handle), playlists or search queries. Mix them freely.
2. Choose languages and outputs (text, segments, SRT, VTT, AI chunks).
3. Optional: add phrases to find.
4. Click Start and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or open All transcripts in one file in the Output tab.

💡 Want a head start? Open the Example tasks tab for ready-made setups (one click to run), e.g. common research jobs with the inputs already filled in.

📥 Input example

{
  "channels": ["@3blue1brown"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 10,
  "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "chunkWords": 300,
  "findPhrases": ["neural network", "gradient descent"],
  "onlyNewVideos": false
}

📤 Output (one row per video)

{
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "title": "But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1",
  "channel": "3Blue1Brown",
  "status": "ok",
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "wordCount": 3410,
  "durationSeconds": 1131,
  "text": "This is a 3. It's sloppily written ...",
  "segments": [{ "start": 4.22, "duration": 2.1, "text": "This is a 3." }],
  "chapters": [{ "start": 0, "startClock": "0:00", "title": "Introduction" }],
  "chunks": [{ "index": 0, "start": 4.22, "end": 98.5, "chapter": "Introduction", "text": "...", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&t=4s" }],
  "mentions": [{ "phrase": "neural network", "timeClock": "1:12", "context": "… what a neural network actually is …", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&t=72s" }],
  "availableLanguages": [{ "code": "en", "name": "English", "auto": false }]
}

Videos without a transcript come back with status no_captions, unavailable or failed and a short explanation. They are not charged.

💰 Pricing

Pay per video with a transcript. Everything else (no captions, unavailable, failed, listing channels and playlists, phrase search, chunks, Markdown file) is included. Platform usage is included. See the Pricing tab for the current price. You can set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops there.

🤖 Use it with AI agents

Works as a tool for AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and others) through the Apify MCP server, and with Zapier, Make, n8n and the Apify API.

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❓ FAQ

Which videos work? Any public video, Short or finished live stream that has captions (human-made or auto-generated). Most videos with speech have auto-generated captions.

Why is a video "no_captions"? The uploader turned captions off, the video has no speech, or it is too new for YouTube's auto-captions. Not charged.

Can it translate? It returns every language the video really has (many videos have several). YouTube's automatic translation is currently not available to tools, so we don't offer a half-working version of it.

Is this allowed? The Actor reads public captions that YouTube shows to every visitor, without logging in. Use transcripts in line with copyright and YouTube's terms.

Something missing or broken? Open an issue. We answer within 12 hours.