YouTube Scraper Pro Actor

Extracts structured data from YouTube videos, shorts, live streams, channels, playlists, and courses. It also processes keyword patterns like #hashtag and @channelname. The actor is designed for reliability, with state preservation to resume from interruptions.

Actor Link: YouTube Scraper Pro
Categories: VIDEOS, SEO_TOOLS

Overview

This Apify actor scrapes publicly available metadata and transcripts from YouTube. It automatically detects the content type from a URL (e.g., video, channel, playlist) and extracts comprehensive data. Output is provided in structured formats like JSON and CSV for analysis.

Key Features

• Broad Content Support: Handles videos, Shorts, live streams, podcasts, courses, channels, and playlists.
• Smart Input Recognition: Automatically detects content type from URLs. Also accepts #hashtag and @channelname patterns.
• Comprehensive Data Extraction: Fetches titles, descriptions, views, upload dates, thumbnails, and more.
• Transcript Download: Retrieves available transcripts in SRT, VTT, TXT, and XML formats.
• Resilient Operation: Built-in state preservation prevents progress loss on migration or failure.
• Performance Controls: Configurable request delays and concurrency to manage speed and avoid rate limits.
• Proxy Support: Designed to work with proxies for sustained, large-scale scraping.

How to Use

1. Provide Input: Supply one or more YouTube URLs or keyword patterns in the actor's input configuration.
2. Configure (Optional): Adjust settings like maxResults, processing speed, or transcript format.
3. Run: Execute the actor. It will process the URLs, extract data, and handle pagination for channels/playlists automatically.
4. Get Output: Download the results from the dataset as JSON, CSV, or other formats.

Input Configuration

The primary input is the rawYouTubeUrls array. Basic usage:

{
  "rawYouTubeUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@nesoacademy/shorts",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUdSpbimHDQ",
    "#tutorial"
  ],
  "maxResults": 50
}

Common Input Parameters:

• rawYouTubeUrls: (Required) Array of YouTube URLs or patterns (@channel, #hashtag).
• maxResults: Maximum number of items to return per channel/playlist.
• languageCode: Preferred language for transcripts (e.g., "en").
• shouldGetTranscripts: Set to true to download subtitle files.
• maxConcurrency & delay: Control request speed to be respectful to YouTube's servers.

Output

The actor outputs a dataset where each item represents a video or content entry. Typical fields include:

{
  "id": "qUdSpbimHDQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUdSpbimHDQ",
  "title": "Example Video Title",
  "channelTitle": "Example Channel",
  "viewCount": "123456",
  "uploadDate": "2023-10-05",
  "description": "Full video description...",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://...jpg",
  "transcriptText": "Full transcript text if requested...",
  "transcriptSrt": "[APIFY DATASET FILE ATTACHMENT LINK]"
}

Results can be downloaded via the Apify console or accessed via API in JSON, CSV, HTML, or other formats.

Compliance Notes

• This tool only extracts publicly accessible data.
• Users must comply with YouTube's Terms of Service.
• Use proxies and rate limiting to distribute request load.
• You are responsible for ensuring your use case complies with applicable laws.