YouTube Transcripts for Channels & Playlists (RAG-ready)

Fetch YouTube transcripts by video, by channel or by playlist, with no API key, and get them back in the shape your pipeline actually wants: overlapping timestamped chunks for embeddings, raw segments, plain text, or SRT.

Built for people feeding video content into RAG pipelines, search indexes and summarisers, rather than copy-pasting one transcript at a time.

Why this one

• Channels and playlists, not just single videos. Give it @veritasium or a playlist URL and it expands to the most recent videos through YouTube's own public feeds. Mix video IDs, channel handles and playlists in one run.
• RAG-ready output. The default format returns overlapping chunks with start and end timestamps, sized by characters, so each chunk is embeddable and still traceable back to a moment in the video. No post-processing.
• Monitor mode. Scheduled runs remember which videos were already transcribed and process only newly published ones. A daily "transcribe whatever these 10 channels post" job costs nothing on quiet days.
• Language handling that degrades sensibly. Preferred language list, human-written captions preferred over auto-generated, optional translation using YouTube's own translation of the track.
• Proxy-backed by default. YouTube throttles transcript requests from datacenter addresses; runs are routed through the Apify proxy so batches do not die halfway.

Output (chunks format)

{
  "video_id": "abc123XYZ_0",
  "video_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123XYZ_0",
  "title": "Example video title",
  "channel": "Example Channel",
  "published": "2026-07-28T15:04:00+00:00",
  "language": "en",
  "is_auto_generated": true,
  "segment_count": 397,
  "duration_seconds": 842.1,
  "chunk_count": 13,
  "chunks": [
    { "index": 0, "start": 0.0, "end": 84.88, "chars": 1220, "text": "..." }
  ],
  "is_new": true
}

Switch outputFormat to segments for raw timestamped lines, plain for a single text field, or srt for subtitle-file content.

Typical setups

Build a searchable index of a channel urls: ["@channelname"], maxVideosPerSource: 15, outputFormat: "chunks", chunkChars: 1200.

Keep an index fresh Same input plus monitorMode: true, scheduled daily. Only new uploads are transcribed.

Subtitles for a specific video urls: ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."], outputFormat: "srt".

Non-English source, English index languages: ["de"], translateTo: "en".

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
urls	sample channel	videos, channels (@handle, UC...), playlists
maxVideosPerSource	10	most recent N per channel/playlist
outputFormat	chunks	chunks, segments, plain, srt
chunkChars / chunkOverlap	1200 / 150	chunking for embeddings
languages	["en"]	preference order
allowAutoGenerated	true	most videos only have auto captions
translateTo	none	translate the track
monitorMode	false	only newly published videos
webhookUrl	none	POST the processed list as JSON
useApifyProxy	true	recommended for reliability

Honest limitations

• Only videos that actually have captions. Many videos have none at all; those are reported in the log as failures rather than silently dropped, and you are not charged a transcript event for them.
• Channel and playlist expansion uses YouTube's public feeds, which return roughly the 15 most recent items. For deep back-catalogues, pass video IDs or playlist IDs directly.
• Auto-generated captions contain recognition errors, no punctuation guarantees and no speaker labels. That is the source, not this actor.
• Transcripts belong to the video creators. This actor retrieves publicly available caption tracks; how you use them is your responsibility.

Keywords

youtube transcript, youtube transcript api, youtube subtitles, youtube captions scraper, transcript for rag, youtube channel transcripts, playlist transcripts, srt export, video to text, llm context, embeddings chunking, youtube monitoring