YouTube, TikTok & Twitter/X Video Extractor

Extract video metadata, engagement stats, comments, and downloadable MP4 videos from YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter/X — all in one actor. Supports batch processing with parallel extraction.

What does this actor do?

Pass one or more video URLs and get back a rich, normalized JSON response for each:

• Video metadata — title, description, duration, upload date, tags, thumbnail
• Engagement stats — views, likes, comments count, shares (TikTok), retweets & bookmarks (Twitter), saves (TikTok)
• Creator info — name, username, profile URL, follower count, avatar
• Video download — MP4 videos downloaded and hosted for you (optional)
• Comments — top-level comments with author info, text, likes, and timestamps

Supported platforms

Platform	Metadata	Stats	Comments	Video Download
YouTube	Yes	Views, likes, comments, followers	Yes	Yes (direct URL)
TikTok	Yes	Views, likes, shares, saves, comments, followers	Yes	Yes (hosted MP4)
Twitter/X	Yes	Views, likes, retweets, bookmarks, comments, followers	Yes	Yes (hosted MP4)

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
urls	string[]	Yes	One or more video URLs to extract
comments	integer	No	Number of comments to extract per video (0–100, default: 5)
downloadVideos	boolean	No	Download videos and store them for you. Default: on for single URL, off for batch

Single URL example

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "comments": 10
}

Batch example

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.tiktok.com/@username/video/7123456789012345678",
    "https://x.com/username/status/1234567890123456789"
  ],
  "comments": 5,
  "downloadVideos": true
}

Batch URLs are processed 3 at a time in parallel for speed. Each URL succeeds or fails independently — one bad URL won't break the rest.

Output

Each URL produces one JSON object in the default dataset:

{
  "platform": "youtube",
  "video": {
    "id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
    "description": "The official video for...",
    "duration": "3:33",
    "duration_seconds": 213,
    "views": 1500000000,
    "likes": 16000000,
    "total_comments": 3200000,
    "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
    "download_url": "https://...",
    "upload_date": "2009-10-25",
    "tags": ["rick astley", "never gonna give you up"]
  },
  "creator": {
    "name": "Rick Astley",
    "username": "@RickAstleyYT",
    "profile_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
    "channel_id": "UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw",
    "subscribers": 8400000,
    "avatar": null
  },
  "comments": [
    {
      "author": "@username",
      "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@username",
      "author_thumbnail": "https://...",
      "text": "This song never gets old!",
      "likes": 42,
      "is_favorited": false,
      "parent": "root",
      "timestamp": "2024-01-15T12:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "_meta": {
    "extracted_at": "2026-02-24T17:31:30.418Z",
    "source_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "extractor": "youtube",
    "comments_requested": 10,
    "comments_returned": 10
  }
}

Platform-specific fields

Some fields are only present for certain platforms:

• TikTok: video.shares, video.saves
• Twitter/X: video.retweets, video.bookmarks, video.has_video, creator.handle

Video downloads

When downloadVideos is enabled:

• YouTube: download_url is a direct MP4 link (works in any browser)
• TikTok & Twitter/X: Videos are downloaded and stored in Apify's key-value store. download_url points to the hosted file

When downloadVideos is off, no download_url is included.

Supported URL formats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/abc123

https://www.tiktok.com/@username/video/7123456789012345678

https://x.com/username/status/1234567890123456789
https://twitter.com/username/status/1234567890123456789

Performance

• Single URL: ~4-8 seconds
• Batch (3 URLs): ~5-10 seconds (parallel processing)
• Batch (10 URLs): ~15-25 seconds

Use cases

• Social media monitoring — track engagement metrics across platforms
• UGC analysis — evaluate user-generated content for ad campaigns
• Content research — analyze trending videos and comment sentiment
• Archival — save video metadata and downloads before content is removed
• Competitive analysis — compare creator stats across YouTube, TikTok, and X
• Dataset building — build datasets of video metadata for ML/analytics

Limitations

• Twitter/X comment extraction requires authenticated session cookies
• TikTok/Twitter download URLs are hosted temporarily in Apify's key-value store
• YouTube download URLs are direct and expire after a few hours
• Some platforms may rate-limit requests from the same IP
• Maximum video download size: 200MB