Twitter / X Video Transcript Scraper

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Extract full, timestamped transcripts from Twitter/X video posts — automatically using native Twitter captions (WebVTT) with Whisper AI speech-to-text as a fallback for uncaptioned videos.

Features

• Native captions first — intercepts Twitter's built-in WebVTT subtitle tracks for fastest, most accurate results
• Whisper AI fallback — uses faster-whisper to transcribe audio when no native captions are available
• Timestamped segments — every output row includes startTime, endTime, and text for precise video navigation
• Full transcript — each row also carries the complete joined transcript for easy search
• Flexible method control — choose auto (native → Whisper), native only, or Whisper only
• Multi-language support — native captions in any language; optional language hint for Whisper
• Anti-detection — Playwright Firefox with stealth fingerprinting, randomised viewports/user-agents, and human-like delays

Input

How to get Twitter cookies

1. Log in to x.com in your browser
2. Open DevTools → Application → Cookies → https://x.com
3. Copy the auth_token and ct0 cookie values
4. Export all cookies as JSON (e.g. using the EditThisCookie browser extension)
5. Paste the JSON array into the cookies input field

Cookies expire periodically — re-export if you see expired_cookies errors.

Output

Each dataset row represents one transcript segment. Tweet metadata is repeated on every row for easy filtering.

Sample output record

{
"tweetUrl":"https://x.com/NASA/status/1858131747319566780",
"tweetId":"1858131747319566780",
"authorUsername":"NASA",
"authorName":"NASA",
"tweetText":"Watch our latest discovery announcement…",
"publishedAt":"2024-11-17T18:30:00.000Z",
"language":"en",
"transcriptMethod":"native",
"transcriptAvailable":true,
"segmentIndex":0,
"startTime":0.0,
"endTime":3.44,
"text":"We made a remarkable discovery this week",
"fullTranscript":"We made a remarkable discovery this week that changes our understanding of the solar system.",
"scrapedAt":"2025-01-15T10:22:33.456Z"
}

Transcription Methods

Whisper Model Selection

Memory Requirements for Long Videos (Whisper)

The actor automatically splits long audio into 10-minute chunks, so there is no video length limit. However, Whisper keeps the model and current chunk in RAM simultaneously:

To set memory in the Apify UI: open your actor run → Input → Options → Memory. Native-caption runs have no meaningful memory requirement regardless of video length.

Limitations

• Cookies required — Twitter restricts video access to authenticated sessions
• Native captions availability — Not all Twitter videos have auto-generated captions; use whisper method for full coverage
• Rate limits — Twitter may throttle rapid scraping; the actor applies human-like delays between requests
• Proxy recommended — For high-volume runs, use Apify residential proxy to avoid IP bans

FAQ

Q: Why do I need cookies? Twitter requires authentication to serve video pages and caption tracks. Without cookies the actor cannot access video content.

Q: What if a video has no captions and I use method=native? The actor outputs a single row per tweet with transcriptAvailable: false and no segment fields. Switch to method=auto or method=whisper to use Whisper AI for those videos.

Q: Can I scrape multiple videos at once? Yes — add multiple URLs to postUrls. The actor processes them sequentially with delays to avoid rate limiting.

Q: Does this work with Twitter Spaces audio? No — Twitter Spaces use a different streaming format. This actor targets video posts only.

Q: How do I filter by language? All output rows include a language field. Use Apify's dataset filtering to select rows by language code.