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 fields

Field	Type	Required or default	What it does
playlists	list of text	required	One per row, up to 50: a playlist id (PL...) or any YouTube URL with list=.
maxVideosPerPlaylist	number	20	Cost ceiling per playlist, in playlist order.
languages	list of text	empty	Language codes in order of preference, for example en, nl, de. Empty takes the video's default track.
preferManualCaptions	true/false	true	On, a human-made track wins over an auto-generated one when both exist.
includeTimestampedSnippets	true/false	false	On, each row also carries the transcript as timed snippets.

Input example

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

Output example

Field	Type	What it holds	Example
playlistId	text	The playlist id, the key in its link.	PLBsP89CPrMeNm71T5gYC6jebm9vPbLBiP
playlistTitle	text	The playlist title as the channel set it.	Reviews!
position	number	The place of the row in the list that was read, counting from 1.	1
videoId	text	The eleven-character YouTube id of the video, the key to join other data on.	rayrrXot17M
url	text	The watch page of the video.	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rayrrXot17M
title	text	The title as the uploader set it.	Nothing Headphone 1 Pro: They Copied the Wrong Thing!
durationSeconds	number	The length of the video in seconds.	860
channelName	text	The channel that published the video.	Marques Brownlee
channelId	text	The channel id (UC...), stable where the channel name can change.	UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ
language	text	The caption language the transcript was taken from, as a language code.	en
isAutoGenerated	true/false	True when the captions come from YouTube's speech recognition instead of the channel.	False
text	text	The full transcript of the video as one block of text.	So Nothing, the company, Nothing has decided to jump into...
snippets	list	The same transcript in timed pieces, each with its start time in seconds and its text.
skippedNoCaptions	number	How many videos in this input were passed over because they carry no captions at all.	0
skippedBlocked	number

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-search: find the playlists to run this on
• 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.

Can I call it from my own code, like an API? Yes. Every run is available through the Apify API: start it with one HTTP request, then read the results as JSON, CSV or Excel from the dataset endpoint, or use the official Python and JavaScript clients. The input is the same JSON as in the input example above, so a scheduled script, a Make or Zapier step or an AI agent can call it without any changes.