YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions in Any Language
Pricing
Pay per usage
Get YouTube transcripts in the language you asked for, with one row per video and a clear status for every failure. Matches regional tracks (pt to pt-BR), flags machine translation, and outputs JSON, text, SRT, VTT or LLM-ready text. You pay only for transcripts retrieved.
YouTube URLs or bare 11-character video ids. Accepts watch, youtu.be, shorts, embed, live and youtube-nocookie links. You get exactly one dataset row per item, whether it succeeds or fails.
[ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw", "kJQP7kiw5Fk"]Same thing as the field above, in Apify's request-list format. Useful when this Actor is called from another Actor or from a webhook.
BCP-47 language code, e.g. "en", "pt", "pt-BR", "es-419". Asking for "pt" correctly matches YouTube's "pt-BR" track. Leave empty to take the video's default track. The output always tells you which language you actually got and how.
When a video has both human-written and auto-generated captions in the same language, take the human ones. Auto-generated captions are noticeably noisier.
If the requested language has no caption track, fall back to YouTube's machine translation. The output marks these rows with translated: true so you never mistake them for native captions. Turn this off to get a clean language_unavailable status instead.
json keeps the timestamped cue array. text is one clean paragraph. srt and vtt are subtitle files. llm is paragraph-chunked text with time anchors, sized for feeding into a language model.
Add title, channel, duration, view count and live status to each row.
How many videos to fetch at once. Raise it for speed, lower it if you are running without a proxy and hitting rate limits.
Per-request timeout before the Actor gives up and retries.
Leave this on residential. YouTube answers datacenter IP addresses with a sign-in wall, so a datacenter proxy returns login_required for most videos even though nothing is wrong with the request. Residential addresses behave normally. Without any proxy at all, YouTube starts returning empty caption bodies partway through a large run.
{ "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": [ "RESIDENTIAL" ]}