Home › Monitoring and research › YouTube transcript extractor
Who it is for: Researchers, content teams, SEO writers, NLP and RAG builders and AI agents that need the words of a video, not the video.
YouTube hides the transcript behind a menu and gives no export. Getting captions for 200 videos by hand, with timestamps and the right language, takes hours.
Give video, channel or playlist URLs and the languages you want. Each run returns one row per video: title, channel, duration, views, language, whether the track is auto-generated, word and segment counts, the full transcript text and optional timed segments, SRT or VTT.
| title | durationSeconds | language | autoGenerated | words | segments | transcript (start) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (… | 213 | en | False | 487 | 61 | [♪♪♪] ♪ We're no strangers to love ♪ ♪ You know the rules a… |
Columns in the free sample CSV: videoId, title, durationSeconds, language, isAutoGenerated, wordCount, segmentCount, transcript, status. Download the sample CSV. The full dataset has more fields than shown here; see the schema page.
| This actor | starvibe/youtube-video-transcript | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per 1,000 videos (list, 10-13) | $3 | $5 |
| Transcript text | Identical in our test | Identical |
| Speed (own result, 10-13) | 13-26 s per run, later sped up with a residential-first player call | about 3 s |
| Languages, SRT, VTT, timed segments | Yes | Text only in our test |
Same-input runs on 2026-10-13. Their speed was better than ours then; ours was improved the same night (build 0.1.10) and we do not claim parity. Prices are the Store prices on that date.
Public videos with captions only. A video with no caption track returns status no_transcript and is not charged as a transcript. YouTube refuses machine translation on some tracks (an HTTP 429), reported in the row instead of failing the run.
Pay per result on Apify, no subscription: $3 per 1,000 videos on the free plan, lower on paid plans, plus $0.00005 per run start. The live price is on the actor page.
Do I need a YouTube API key?
No. The actor reads the public caption tracks of a video.
Does it return timestamps?
Yes. Ask for segments, SRT or VTT in outputFormats.
Disclosure: we build and maintain this actor. Public data only. Rival figures were measured by us on the date shown and prices change; the Store page is authoritative.
Data and schema
Comparison
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