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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.

Maintained by Trisecode.