Youtube Subtitles Scraper

YouTube Captions & Transcripts Scraper (Apify Actor) Extract clean, timestamped YouTube subtitles at scale. Perfect for creators, researchers, SEO teams, accessibility workflows, and AI/NLP pipelines that need accurate multi‑language transcripts fast. ### Quick start - Open the Actor on Apify and paste one or many YouTube URLs. - Select Language mode: “Get all available” or “Get by code” (e.g., en, es). - (Optional) Keep auto‑generated subtitles enabled for broader coverage. - Run the Actor. When finished, export the dataset as JSON or CSV. - Use the results for summaries, translations, search, or content repurposing. ### What it does - Bulk‑extracts captions/transcripts from any public YouTube videos - Multi‑language: fetch all available languages or only the ones you choose - Keeps timestamps and ordering for easy quoting and analysis - Handles auto‑generated subtitles when official ones aren’t available - Designed for reliability with smart retries and proxy rotation on errors - Outputs structured data you can export as JSON, CSV, or use directly in apps ### Who it’s for - Content creators and editors repurposing videos into articles, posts, or newsletters - Researchers and journalists collecting quotes and evidence from video sources - SEO and marketing teams mining topics, entities, and keywords from video content - Accessibility and compliance teams generating readable caption text - AI & data teams feeding high‑quality text into summarization, RAG, or LLM training ### Popular use cases - Summarize long videos into notes, briefs, or articles - Create highlight reels and pull timestamped quotes for social posts - Translate and localize scripts to reach global audiences - Index channel archives for topic discovery and search - Build clean training datasets for speech and language models --- ## Simple workflow 1) Add one or many YouTube URLs (bulk friendly) 2) Choose language preference: - Get all available languages, or - Specify language codes (e.g., en, es, de) 3) Run and download results from the dataset as JSON/CSV That’s it — no coding required. --- ## Input options (plain English) - Video URLs: paste one or more links. You can bulk‑edit the list. - Language mode: - Get by code — provide one or more language codes. - Get all available — collect every transcript language offered by the video. - Language codes (when using “Get by code”): examples en, en, es. - Fetch auto‑generated subtitles: include YouTube’s auto captions when official ones aren’t present. - Max retries: how many times to retry a transcript fetch if a request temporarily fails. - Proxy settings: uses Apify Proxy under the hood. On network/proxy errors, the actor rotates to a fresh proxy to keep your run moving. Notes - You can add/remove URLs one‑by‑one or paste a whole list. - URLs are deduplicated while preserving order. --- ## Output at a glance For each video, the actor saves one dataset item with: - video_id and original url - supported_languages: a list of language codes found - transcripts: a mapping of language code → transcript entries (with timestamps) You can export the dataset to JSON/CSV directly in Apify. --- ## Why this tool - Scale: process dozens or thousands of videos in one run - Accuracy: preserves timestamps and structure for downstream analysis - Coverage: fetch every available language or narrow to what you need - Reliability: on‑error proxy rotation and retries reduce flaky failures - Ready for AI: clean text that plugs straight into summarization, search, and RAG --- ## Tips & best practices - Exploring a channel? Start with “Get all available” languages to see coverage, then narrow to specific codes. - Keep auto‑generated subtitles enabled to maximize results on videos without official captions. - For lighter outputs, specify just the languages you need. - Always respect platform terms, privacy, and content rights. --- ## FAQ - Does it work on private or members‑only videos? - No. It works with publicly available videos that offer captions/transcripts. - Does it bypass paywalls or protections? - No. It only collects data that YouTube exposes for public content. - Are timestamps preserved? - Yes. Each transcript entry includes start times so you can quote precisely. - Can I run this in bulk? - Yes. Paste a list of URLs and the actor will process them in order.