YouTube Extractor (Transcripts + Metadata)

Extract structured transcripts and metadata from YouTube videos. This Apify actor is built for speed and reliability, outputting clean JSON for data pipelines and analysis.

Overview

This actor takes YouTube video URLs and returns complete transcripts with precise timestamps alongside comprehensive video and channel metadata. It supports batch processing and offers an optional integration for extracting comments via a separate scraper in standby mode.

Key Features

• Complete Data Extraction: Full transcripts with second-by-second timestamps, video metadata (title, views, likes, date), and channel info (name, ID, subscribers).
• Performance & Reliability: Optimized for speed with smart caching, batch processing, and automatic fallback between free and paid processing modes.
• Developer-Friendly: Outputs clean JSON, CSV, or Excel. Offers flexible configuration for timestamp inclusion, transcript cleaning level, and caching.
• Optional Comment Extraction: Integrates with the YouTube Comments Scraper in standby mode for concurrent, real-time comment scraping when enabled.

How to Use

1. Provide Input: Supply one or more YouTube video URLs.
2. Configure: Set options like cleaningLevel, includeTimestamps, and caching. Optionally enable comment extraction.
3. Run: Execute the actor. It processes videos and extracts data.
4. Get Results: Download the structured output in your chosen format.

Basic Input Example

{
  "youtubeUrl": [
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXAMPLE_ID_1" },
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXAMPLE_ID_2" }
  ],
  "cleaningLevel": "mild",
  "includeTimestamps": true
}

Enabling Comment Extraction

To extract comments, set extractcomments: true and configure the related parameters. This leverages a dedicated standby scraper for faster, resumable comment collection.

{
  "youtubeUrl": [ { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A" } ],
  "cleaningLevel": "mild",
  "includeTimestamps": true,
  "extractcomments": true,
  "sortBy": "top",
  "maxComments": 50,
  "maxRepliesPerComment": 5
}

Comment Parameters:
* extractcomments (boolean, default false): Enable comment extraction.
* sortBy (string, default "top"): Sort method: "top" or "newest".
* maxComments (integer, default 10): Max top-level comments per video (10-100,000).
* maxRepliesPerComment (integer, default 0): Max replies per comment. Set to 0 to disable replies for faster scraping.

Input/Output

Input: Accepts an array of YouTube video URLs via the youtubeUrl field, plus configuration options.

Output: Returns a structured JSON object per video. The core output includes:
* videoId, VideoURL, Video_title
* transcript: An array of objects with text, start (seconds), and duration.
* metadata: Contains views, likes, channelName, channelId, channelSubscribers, publishedAt, etc.
* analytics: Includes wordCount and estimatedDuration.

When extractcomments is enabled, the output also includes a comments array containing the scraped comment data.