YouTube Transcript Extractor & Video Detail Scraper

Overview

This Apify actor scrapes comprehensive metadata and transcripts from YouTube videos. It extracts over 35 data points, including core metrics, engagement analytics, and multilingual transcripts, outputting structured JSON data. It's designed for developers, researchers, and marketers who need programmatic access to YouTube video details and spoken content.

Key Features

• Video Metadata: Extracts title, description, view count, likes, keywords, categories, and thumbnail URLs.
• Channel Details: Retrieves channel name, ID, and subscriber information.
• Engagement Analytics: Captures view counts, comment data, and performance metrics like CTR and retention (when available).
• Multilingual Transcripts: Fetches full video transcripts. Supports original language or auto-translation into over 100 languages. Outputs both timestamped and clean text versions.
• Technical Robustness: Handles all YouTube URL formats (including Shorts and embeds), includes proxy support for reliability, and offers configurable concurrency and retry logic.

How to Use

1. Ensure you have an active Apify account.
2. Configure the actor's input with your target YouTube video URLs and desired settings (see Input Configuration).
3. Run the actor on the Apify platform.
4. Retrieve the structured output dataset, which includes all scraped details and transcripts.

Input Configuration

Configure the actor using a JSON input. Here is the primary structure:

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" }
  ],
  "maxConcurrency": 10,
  "maxRequestRetries": 10,
  "proxy": { "useApifyProxy": true },
  "includeTranscript": true,
  "language": "en"
}

Key Input Fields:
* startUrls: (Required) An array of objects containing the YouTube video URLs to scrape.
* maxConcurrency: Maximum number of concurrent page processing requests.
* maxRequestRetries: Number of retry attempts for failed requests.
* proxy: Configuration for Apify Proxy to avoid blocks.
* includeTranscript: Set to true to fetch the video transcript.
* language: The language code (e.g., 'en', 'es') for the transcript. Falls back to default if requested language is unavailable.

Output

The actor outputs an array of items, one per video. Each item is a JSON object containing the scraped data. A transcript example is shown below; the full output includes all mentioned metadata fields.

{
  "transcript": [
    {
      "text": "so if you want immediate access to",
      "startMs": "160",
      "endMs": "3760",
      "startTimeText": "0:00"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Video Title Here",
  "viewCount": "1234567",
  "channelId": "UCxxxxx",
  // ... (all other video details)
}