YouTube Transcript Scraper: Any Language, Timestamps, Translate

Get the full transcript of any YouTube video: plain text, timed segments, or timestamped lines. Paste video links, get transcripts back. Works for regular videos, Shorts and live replays.

Why this one

• You pay only for transcripts you get. A video with no captions, a private or removed video, or a video that fails is listed in the results with the reason, and you are not charged for it.
• Built to get through. YouTube blocks most datacenter IPs. Every retry uses a new residential IP, so one blocked IP does not fail your video.
• Human captions first. When a video has captions written by a person, you get those, not YouTube's automatic speech guess. You can see which one you got (isAutoGenerated).
• Any language, plus translation. Ask for a language, or have YouTube translate the captions.
• Video details included at no extra cost: title, channel, duration and view count.

Input

Field	What it does
videos	Video URLs or ids. Any form: watch?v=, youtu.be/, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/, or the 11-character id.
language	Preferred language code, like en, es, pt-BR. Empty = English, else the first available.
translateTo	Optional language code to translate the captions into.
includeSegments	Timed segments with start and duration in seconds (default on).
includeTimestampedText	One line per caption, like [01:05] text (default off).

{
  "videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ", "https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"],
  "language": "en",
  "includeTimestampedText": true
}

Output

{
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "channelId": "UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
  "durationSeconds": 19,
  "viewCount": 444634557,
  "isLive": false,
  "language": "en",
  "originalLanguage": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "translated": false,
  "availableLanguages": ["de", "en"],
  "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants the coo ...",
  "wordCount": 39,
  "timestampedText": "[00:01] All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants\n[00:05] t ...",
  "segments": [{ "start": 1.2, "duration": 2.16, "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants" }]
}

status is one of: ok (charged), no_captions, unavailable (private, removed or blocked in the proxy's country), age_restricted, error, invalid_input (none of these are charged).

Pricing

Pay per transcript returned. Nothing else is charged.

Good uses

Feeding videos to ChatGPT or another AI, summaries and notes, research across many videos, content repurposing, SEO, and searching what was said in a video.

Limits

Videos with captions turned off by the uploader have no transcript to get. Age-restricted videos need a signed-in account, which this tool does not use.