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YouTube Transcript API

Pricing

$7.00 / 1,000 results

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YouTube Transcript API

YouTube Transcript API

Get YouTube transcripts, captions, and subtitles from any video URL or video ID. Export results as JSON, text, SRT, or WebVTT for automation and analysis.

Pricing

$7.00 / 1,000 results

Rating

0.0

(0)

Developer

Api Merge

Api Merge

Maintained by Community

Actor stats

0

Bookmarked

4

Total users

3

Monthly active users

20 hours ago

Last modified

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What does YouTube Transcript API do?

YouTube Transcript API fetches a transcript for a YouTube video and saves it to the default Apify dataset.

How it works

Provide a YouTube videoId, choose a language, and select a format. The Actor returns the transcript if YouTube exposes it for the selected language. If the first request is blocked, it retries internally.

No translation fallback is performed by this Actor.

Input

FieldRequiredDescription
videoIdYesYouTube video ID. A full YouTube URL is also accepted.
languageYesTranscript language code, for example en, tr, de, es.
formatYesOutput format: json, text, srt, or webvtt.

The Actor also accepts legacy aliases from the copied template: videoUrl for videoId, and targetLanguage for language.

Input example

{
"videoId": "IELMSD2kdmk",
"language": "en",
"format": "json"
}

Text output example:

{
"videoId": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IELMSD2kdmk",
"language": "en",
"format": "text"
}

Output

The Actor pushes one dataset item with success, message, and response fields. The response field contains the returned transcript response.

JSON output example

{
"success": true,
"message": "Transcript response fetched successfully.",
"response": {
"videoId": "IELMSD2kdmk",
"language": "English",
"languageCode": "en",
"isGenerated": true,
"snippets": [
{
"text": "Transcript text...",
"start": 0,
"duration": 4.2
}
]
}
}

Text/SRT/WebVTT output example

{
"success": true,
"message": "Transcript response fetched successfully.",
"response": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,200\nTranscript text...\n"
}

Output fields

FieldDescription
successtrue when the Actor completed cleanly, including free-limit notifications.
messageHuman-readable result or warning message.
responseTranscript response in the selected format, or an error response if the request fails.

Notes

  • Some videos do not expose transcripts.
  • The requested language must exist as a transcript language for the video.
  • If the request returns an error response, that response is still saved in the response field.
  • Free Apify plan users are limited to 5 runs per UTC day. When the daily limit is reached, a warning item is written to the dataset before requesting data.