YouTube Video Clipper

An Apify actor that extracts multiple clips from a YouTube video using specified timestamps. It's designed for creating social media highlights, short clips, or compilations from longer videos.

Overview

Provide a YouTube URL and a list of timestamps. The actor downloads the video and cuts out the specified clips without re-encoding the video stream, which keeps processing fast and cost-efficient. Each clip and its auto-generated thumbnail are made available via direct download URLs.

Key Features

• Precise Clipping: Extract multiple clips from a single video using exact start and end times.
• Stream Copy Processing: Uses ffmpeg's stream copy method to avoid CPU-heavy re-encoding, reducing run time and cost.
• Automatic Thumbnails: Generates a thumbnail image for each clip.
• Quality Options: Supports output qualities from 360p to 1080p (default is 720p).
• Direct URLs: Output provides ready-to-use URLs for downloading clips and thumbnails.
• Handles Restrictions: Optional proxy and cookie support for videos with geographic or access restrictions.

How to Use

1. Run the actor via the Apify Console or API with a JSON input containing the video URL and your clip definitions.
2. The actor downloads the source video, processes the clips, and uploads them to Apify's Key-Value Store.
3. Retrieve the results, which include the download URLs for each clip and thumbnail.

Input

The input is a JSON object. The only required fields are videoUrl and clips.

{
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example",
  "clips": [
    {
      "name": "intro",
      "start": "00:00:05",
      "end": "00:00:15"
    },
    {
      "name": "highlight",
      "start": "00:01:30",
      "end": "00:01:45"
    }
  ],
  "quality": "720p",
  "enableFallbacks": true,
  "proxy": { "useApifyProxy": true },
  "cookies": [{"name": "example", "value": "example"}],
  "maxRetries": 3
}

Key Parameters:
* videoUrl: (Required) The full URL of the YouTube video.
* clips: (Required) An array of clip objects. Each requires a name, start time, and end time in HH:MM:SS format. Maximum 20 clips, each max 10 minutes.
* quality: Output quality tier (360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). Affects pricing. Default is 720p.
* enableFallbacks: If true, the actor will use more expensive processing methods if the primary method fails. Adds ~$0.09 per fallback. Default is true.
* proxy: Optional proxy configuration for accessing region-blocked content.
* cookies: An array of YouTube cookies (as name/value objects) for accessing private, age-restricted, or membership videos.

Output

The output is a dataset where each item represents a processed clip. A successful clip includes:

{
  "name": "intro",
  "startTime": "00:00:05",
  "endTime": "00:00:15",
  "url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../clip_video.mp4",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../thumbnail.jpg",
  "duration": 10,
  "size": 2457600,
  "quality": "720p",
  "outputFormat": "mp4",
  "failed": false
}

Resource Notes: The actor is lightweight. For most videos, 1024 MB memory and 0.5 Compute Units are sufficient. For source videos longer than one hour, consider increasing memory to 2048 MB.