YouTube Transcript Scraper — Channels, Playlists & AI Chunks
Pricing
Pay per event
Transcripts for YouTube videos, channels, playlists & searches. Date filters, only-new mode, AI-ready chunks, SRT/VTT. Pay only for transcripts found.
Videos, Shorts, channels (@handle or URL), playlists, in any mix (max 200). Each transcript delivered costs $0.003; videos without captions are free. Channels give newest uploads first. Also accepts 'videoUrls', 'urls', 'startUrls' from other transcript actors.
[ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M"]Get transcripts for the top video results of each YouTube search.
[ "how transformers work"]Cap per channel, playlist or search (1–1000). Single videos count as one. Start small; raise for bulk runs.
'chunks' and 'chunkRows' split at ~chunk length and at creator chapters, each with a deep link to that second. Full plain text is always included (except in chunkRows).
Language codes in order of preference (e.g. en, es, de). 'en' also matches en-US/en-GB. If none exists, you get the video's own main transcript; 'availableLanguages' lists the rest.
[ "en"]Which uploads to take from channels.
Only videos published on/after this date: YYYY-MM-DD or relative like '7 days', '2 weeks', '3 months'. Works for channels, playlists and searches.
Only videos published on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD or relative).
Order of search results. 'date' = newest first (date filters then stop paging early).
YouTube's upload-date filter for searches.
YouTube's duration filter for searches.
Skip videos this input already delivered in earlier runs, so a daily schedule only pays for new uploads. Memory lives in a key-value store 'youtube-transcripts-state' in your account.
Share one 'only new' memory across different inputs by giving them the same name. Empty = one memory per set of sources.
Words or phrases to look for (case-insensitive). Each video gets 'matches': the quoted passage, its timestamp, chapter and a link to that second. In 'chunkRows' format every chunk gets 'hasMatch'.
[ "pricing", "open source"]Deliver only videos whose transcript contains at least one of the words above ($0.003 each). Videos that don't match cost $0.001 each (we still had to fetch and search them). Great for brand or topic monitoring.
For AI-ready chunks: about how many seconds of speech per chunk.
Each chunk also starts with the last N seconds of the previous chunk, for better retrieval in RAG. 0 = no overlap. Must be less than chunk length.
By default human-made captions win over YouTube's automatic ones.
Title, channel, handle, publish date, duration, views, likes, category, keywords, description, thumbnail, chapters.