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YouTube Transcript Scraper — download YouTube transcripts, captions & subtitles

Get the full transcript of any YouTube video in seconds. Paste a video link, a list of links, or a whole YouTube playlist — and download clean transcripts, captions, and subtitles as TXT, SRT, or JSON. No YouTube API key. No quotas. No browser extensions. Works on single videos or thousands at a time.

Whether you need a quick YouTube to text conversion, SRT subtitles for a video editor, or structured JSON transcripts to feed an LLM for summarization, this Actor handles it in one click — or one API call.

New to Apify? Sign up for a free account and you'll get $5 in free platform credits every month, forever — enough to transcribe thousands of YouTube videos without spending a cent. No credit card required.

Why use this YouTube Transcript Scraper?

Most YouTube transcript scrapers force you to do one video at a time with no options — you paste a URL, you get plain text, end of story. This Actor was built for people who actually have work to do.

• Bulk downloads — paste hundreds of URLs in a single run, or even mix video URLs, video IDs, and playlist links together. No queueing up runs one by one.
• Full playlist support — drop in any YouTube playlist URL and get every video transcribed in one go. No manually expanding the playlist yourself.
• Three output formats — TXT for reading, SRT for subtitling/video editors, JSON for AI pipelines and code. Pick what you need; don't post-process.
• Multi-language with priority fallback — list languages in order (e.g. en, then es, then pt) and the Actor picks the best match. Manual captions are preferred over auto-generated.
• Built-in translation — translate any video's transcript into any language YouTube supports without a second tool.
• Smart segment merging — turn YouTube's choppy 2-second caption fragments into clean, readable sentences and paragraphs — perfect for blog posts and LLM prompts.
• Format control — keep or strip [MM:SS] timestamps, preserve original <b>/<i> tags, your call.
• No API key, no quotas — paste, click, done. Or call it from the Apify API and integrate with Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, your CRM, or any LLM workflow.
• Reliable on blocks — handles manual and auto-generated captions, gracefully falls back when one is missing, and rotates connections automatically when YouTube blocks the cheap path — so big jobs actually finish.

How it compares

What can I do with YouTube transcripts?

• Summarize long videos with AI — pipe the JSON output straight into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or your own RAG pipeline.
• Repurpose video into blog posts, newsletters, and social clips — start from a clean text transcript instead of typing.
• SEO and content research — search across hundreds of competitor videos for keywords, topics, or product mentions.
• Add subtitles to your own videos — export SRT and drop it into Premiere, Final Cut, CapCut, or DaVinci Resolve.
• Localize content — translate any video's transcript to English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and more.
• Make videos accessible — generate readable text versions for screen readers and the hearing-impaired.
• Academic research — build datasets from lectures, podcasts, interviews, and conference talks.

How to use the YouTube Transcript Scraper

1. Click Try for free at the top of this page.
2. Paste one or more YouTube video URLs, video IDs, or a playlist URL into the YouTube URLs field.
3. Pick an output format — TXT, SRT, or JSON.
4. (Optional) Set a preferred language, translate to another language, or merge segments into paragraphs.
5. Click Start. When the run finishes, open the Output tab to view, download, or export results as JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS.

You can also trigger runs and pull results programmatically via the Apify API — perfect for scheduled jobs, webhooks, and integrations.

Input options

Example output

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS.

{
"videoId":"dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
"format":"json",
"segmentCount":58,
"transcript":[
{"text":"We're no strangers to love","start":18.8,"duration":4.16},
{"text":"You know the rules and so do I","start":23.0,"duration":3.2}
]
}

How much does it cost to scrape YouTube transcripts?

Apify uses pay-per-usage pricing — you only pay for the compute and storage your run actually consumes. A typical short video transcript completes in seconds and costs fractions of a cent.

Don't have an Apify account yet? Create one free here and get $5 of platform credits every single month, free forever — that's enough for thousands of YouTube transcripts at no cost. No credit card, no trial timer, no catch. Need to transcribe a whole channel or playlist library? Schedule a run, walk away, and pick up the dataset when it's done.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. The Actor pulls publicly-available caption data the same way your browser does. No Google Cloud project, no OAuth, no quota.

Which videos can it transcribe? Any public YouTube video that has captions — manually-written or auto-generated. Videos with captions disabled by the uploader, private videos, or region-locked videos cannot be processed; those return an error item in the dataset so you always know which ones failed and why.

What if a video has no transcript or captions? Some videos simply have no captions, or have them disabled by the uploader. By default, the Actor handles this automatically: the Use AI Speech-to-Text when no transcript exists option (on by default) transcribes the video's audio directly with AI models via our Speech to Text Actor — no existing captions required. These rows are marked with source: "speech-to-text" in the dataset. Each such video starts a separate, billable run; turn the option off if you'd rather just get an error item for captionless videos instead.

Can it transcribe live streams or Shorts? Yes — as long as YouTube has generated captions for them.

Can I translate a transcript into another language? Yes. Set Translate To to any language code YouTube supports for that video (e.g. en, es, fr, de, hi, ja, pt).

Is YouTube scraping legal? This Actor only reads publicly-visible caption data. You remain responsible for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable laws — don't use it for copyright violation or to scrape private content.

Do I really get $5 free every month? Yes — the Apify free plan gives every account $5 of platform credits per month, forever, no credit card required. That covers thousands of YouTube transcripts. Sign up here to claim it.

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Issues tab of this Actor in Apify Console. For custom scraping projects, get in touch through apify.com.