Youtube Transcript Scraper

Fetch transcripts and captions from YouTube videos using Apify Proxy with session management and automatic retry logic.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
videos	array	✅	-	List of videos with URLs and preferred languages
includeTimestamps	boolean	❌	true	Include start time and duration for each snippet

Video Object

Each video in the videos array has:

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
url	string	✅	-	YouTube video URL (supports regular videos, shorts, youtu.be)
languages	array	❌	["en"]	Preferred transcript languages for this video

Example Input

{
    "videos": [
        {
            "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
            "languages": ["en"]
        },
        {
            "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0",
            "languages": ["ko", "en"]
        },
        {
            "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/97IwoIqBCZk",
            "languages": ["en"]
        },
        {
            "url": "https://youtu.be/kJQP7kiw5Fk",
            "languages": ["es", "en"]
        }
    ],
    "includeTimestamps": true
}

Supported URL Formats

• Regular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• Short link: https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID

Supported Languages

The actor supports any language available on the YouTube video. Common language codes:

Code	Language
en	English
es	Spanish
fr	French
de	German
pt	Portuguese
ja	Japanese
ko	Korean
zh	Chinese
ar	Arabic
hi	Hindi
vi	Vietnamese

If the preferred language is not available, the actor will fall back to the next language in the list or the video's default transcript.

Output Format

The actor outputs a JSON object for each video with the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
videoId	string	YouTube video ID extracted from URL
videoUrl	string	Full YouTube video URL
language	string	Language of the fetched transcript
isGenerated	boolean	true if auto-generated captions, false if manually created
transcriptText	string	Full transcript text (with timestamps if enabled)
snippetCount	number	Total number of transcript snippets
snippets	array	Array of snippet objects (only when includeTimestamps: true)
success	boolean	true if transcript was fetched successfully
error	string	Error message (only present when success: false)

Example Output (with timestamps)

{
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "language": "en",
    "isGenerated": true,
    "transcriptText": "[0.00s] Hello world\n[2.50s] Welcome to the video",
    "snippetCount": 2,
    "snippets": [
        {"text": "Hello world", "start": 0.0, "duration": 2.5},
        {"text": "Welcome to the video", "start": 2.5, "duration": 3.0}
    ],
    "success": true
}

Example Output (without timestamps)

{
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "language": "en",
    "isGenerated": false,
    "transcriptText": "Hello world Welcome to the video",
    "snippetCount": 2,
    "snippets": null,
    "success": true
}

Recommended Memory

512 MB (default)

Scraping Policy

This actor respects YouTube's terms of service and is designed for legitimate use cases:

• ✅ Fetches only publicly available transcripts/captions
• ✅ Does not bypass any authentication or access controls
• ✅ Uses rate limiting and proxy rotation to avoid overloading servers
• ✅ Intended for research, accessibility, content analysis, and archival purposes

Do not use this actor to:

• ❌ Scrape private or unlisted video transcripts without permission
• ❌ Violate YouTube's Terms of Service
• ❌ Redistribute copyrighted content without authorization

Apify Platform Policy

This actor runs on the Apify platform and adheres to:

• Apify Terms of Service
• Apify Acceptable Use Policy
• Apify Privacy Policy

Users are responsible for ensuring their use of this actor complies with all applicable laws and the terms of service of both Apify and YouTube.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Support

For issues or feature requests, please open an issue on the actor's GitHub repository or contact the author through Apify Console.