YouTube Playlist Transcripts: all videos of a playlist, one run

Transcripts for the videos of a YouTube playlist in one run, up to 50 playlists: give a playlist URL or id, get one row per video with full transcript text, language, duration and views. Videos without captions cost nothing. Pay per transcript.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• One run, no glue: the playlist is walked over the slim Innertube route (about 2 KB per video instead of the tens of kilobytes a playlist page costs) and every video is sent straight into the transcript route. Measured on a 5-video review playlist: 5 transcripts of roughly 12,000 characters each, one row per video, in a single run.
• Honest counting: a video without captions is never a row and never charged; it is counted in skippedNoCaptions on every row of that playlist, so the gap is visible instead of silent. A playlist that YouTube does not know comes back as one error row with NOT_FOUND.

Who this is for

Paste playlist URLs or bare playlist ids in playlists (up to 50 per run), set maxVideosPerPlaylist (default 20, ceiling 200) and press Start. Every delivered row carries the playlist id and title, the video's position in the list, its channel, the transcript language, whether the captions were auto-generated and the full transcript text. Turn on includeTimestampedSnippets when the text has to be aligned to the video.

Who this is not for

Only videos that have captions (manual or auto-generated) produce a row. Music playlists and very new uploads often have none; those videos are counted in skippedNoCaptions rather than delivered. Private, deleted and members-only videos are skipped the same way. The transcript is text, not a translation: the language you get is the language the captions are in, unless you list preferred languages.

Input example

{
    "playlists": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBsP89CPrMeNm71T5gYC6jebm9vPbLBiP"
    ],
    "maxVideosPerPlaylist": 20,
    "languages": [],
    "preferManualCaptions": true,
    "includeTimestampedSnippets": false
}

Output example

• playlistId
• playlistTitle
• position
• videoId
• url
• title
• channelName
• durationSeconds
• language
• isAutoGenerated
• text
• snippets
• skippedNoCaptions

Error codes: INVALID_PLAYLIST, PLAYLIST_NOT_FOUND, NO_VIDEOS, NO_TRANSCRIPT, BLOCKED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "playlistId": "PLBsP89CPrMeNm71T5gYC6jebm9vPbLBiP",
  "playlistTitle": "Reviews!",
  "position": 1,
  "videoId": "ohqxP8EEumo",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohqxP8EEumo",
  "title": "iPhone 18 Pro Review: All About that Chip",
  "channelName": "Marques Brownlee",
  "channelId": "UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ",
  "durationSeconds": 995,
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "text": "So if this were back in 2011, this is what we would call an S update. The iPhone 18 Pro is basically an iPhone 17 Pro with a chip update, a camera upgrade, and ...",
  "skippedNoCaptions": 0,
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• youtube-playlist-videos: the video list of the playlist, without transcripts
• youtube-channel-transcripts: the same idea for a whole channel
• youtube-transcript-bulk: transcripts for a list of specific videos

Pricing

Pay per event: one transcript-fetched event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

Do I pay for videos without captions? No. Only a delivered transcript is charged; a playlist that fails or a video without captions costs nothing.

How long can the playlist be? Up to 200 videos per playlist per run (maxVideosPerPlaylist); larger playlists are cut at that ceiling, in playlist order.

Which language do I get? The manual captions of the video when they exist, otherwise the auto-generated ones. Pass languages (for example ["en", "nl"]) to prefer specific tracks, and preferManualCaptions: false to take auto-generated captions first.

Can I get timestamps? Yes, set includeTimestampedSnippets to true and every row gets a snippets list with start time, duration and text per caption line.

What about a private or unlisted playlist? Private playlists cannot be read; unlisted ones work as long as you have the URL.

Is personal data collected? The transcript is the caption track YouTube exposes for that video; it is not generated by this actor and the text follows the captioner, including its punctuation and line breaks.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.