YouTube Video Data & Transcript Scraper (Free & No API Key)

Apify Actor that extracts detailed metadata and transcripts (subtitles) from YouTube videos without requiring your own YouTube Data API key.

🚀 Key Features

• ⚡️ Fast & Efficient: Uses lightweight methods first, falling back to heavier extraction techniques only when necessary to ensure speed and reliability.
• 📝 Full Transcripts: extracts subtitles with precise timestamps. Supports both manual and auto-generated captions.
• 🔍 Deep Metadata: Fetches more than just the title. Get views, likes, upload date, duration, channel info, tags, and categories.
• 🌍 Smart Language Detection: Automatically prioritizes the best available transcript (Video Language > English > Any).
• 🛡️ Anti-Blocking System: Robust 3-layer fallback strategy to evade rate limits and 429 errors.
• 💰 Cost-Effective: Designed to run with minimal resources.

💡 Typical Use Cases

• AI Content Analysis: Feed video transcripts into LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude) for summarization or RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
• Sentiment Analysis: Analyze what creators are saying about specific topics or brands.
• SEO & Keyword Research: Extract tags, descriptions, and captions to optimize your own content.
• Content Archiving: Save metadata and text representations of videos for historical records.

🏎️ How It Works

This Actor uses a smart waterfall approach to get the data:

1. Primary: Uses direct, lightweight internal APIs for the fastest execution.
2. Secondary: Falls back to alternative endpoints if the primary method fails.
3. Tertiary: Uses a browser-like emulation layer as a final failsafe for stubborn videos.

📦 Input Configuration

The Actor accepts a simple JSON input:

{
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
  "includeTimestamps": true
}

Parameters

• video_url (String, Required): The full URL of the YouTube video.
• includeTimestamps (Boolean, Optional): Set to true (default) to get start/duration for each segment, or false for plain text only.

📄 Output Example

The Actor produces a unified JSON result (video_data):

{
  "video": {
    "id": "qDrMAzCHFUU",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU",
    "title": "Competing Against Luck - Clayton Christensen",
    "description": "Discover the 'Job to be Done' theory...",
    "views": 150230,
    "upload_date": "2016-10-25T00:00:00",
    "length_seconds": 3280
  },
  "transcript": {
    "language": "en",
    "is_generated": true,
    "segments": [
      {
        "text": "hello I'm desde love welcome to the idea",
        "start": 6.04,
        "duration": 4.95
      }
      // ... more segments
    ],
    "full_text": "hello I'm desde love welcome to the idea my guest today is...",
    "source": "api-internal"
  },
  "extras": {
    "engagement": {
      "like_count": 1200,
      "comment_count": 45
    },
    "channel": {
      "name": "TED",
      "id": "UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
      "followers": 23000000
    },
    "tags": ["innovation", "business", "strategy"]
  },
  "fetched_at": "2025-12-07T12:00:00Z"
}

🛠️ Integration

You can easily integrate this Actor into your existing workflows:

• Make.com / Zapier: Trigger automations when new video data is scraped.
• LangChain / LlamaIndex: Use the JSON output directly as a document loader source.
• API: Call this Actor programmatically via the Apify Client.

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Maintained by Trisecode.