YouTube Video Details Scraper

Extracts structured metadata from YouTube videos, including channel information and social links, without downloading video files. Built with the Apify Python SDK for reliable, proxy-aware scraping at scale.

Overview

This actor scrapes YouTube video pages to collect comprehensive metadata. It processes single or multiple video URLs, enriches the data with channel details from the /about page, and outputs clean JSON. It's designed for data engineers, researchers, and automation workflows needing reliable YouTube data extraction.

Key Features

• Comprehensive Metadata: Extracts title, description, duration, view/like counts (formatted human-readably, e.g., 1.2M), uploader info, tags, hashtags, and description links.
• Channel Enrichment: Fetches additional channel data, including the "About" text and social media links.
• Playback URL: Resolves the best available combined audio+video stream URL, which can function like a download link.
• Proxy Optimized: Supports and is optimized for Apify Proxy, with residential proxy groups and session reuse to reduce costs.
• Robust Handling: Gracefully manages private, unavailable, or restricted videos.
• High-Quality Thumbnails: Attempts to fetch the maximum resolution thumbnail available.

How to Use

Provide a list of YouTube video URLs via the startUrls input. The actor will process each URL, extract and enrich the metadata, and push each result as a separate item to the Apify dataset.

Input Configuration

Configure the actor run using the following input fields:

Example Input:

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJPFYs_88-g" },
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxYjTTXc-J8" }
  ],
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Output

Each successfully scraped video becomes one dataset item in JSON format. The output includes the core video details, enriched channel information, and the playback URL.

Example Output Structure:

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJPFYs_88-g",
  "video_id": "TJPFYs_88-g",
  "title": "Video Title Here",
  "description": "Full video description...",
  "view_count": 1234567,
  "view_count_text": "1.2M",
  "channel_id": "UC...",
  "channel_name": "Channel Name",
  "channel_about": "Text from the channel's About page.",
  "channel_links": ["https://twitter.com/example"],
  "playback_url": "https://rr2---sn-...googlevideo.com/...",
  "thumbnails": [...],
  "tags": ["tag1", "tag2"],
  "hashtags": ["#example"],
  "description_links": ["https://example.com"]
}