🎬 YouTube Transcript & Metadata Extractor

Extract YouTube transcripts, subtitles, and complete video metadata in seconds - no manual work, no copy-paste, just pure automated data extraction.

📺Watch Demo

Extract transcripts from any YouTube video in 3 clicks

Paste URL → Click Start → Download data. That's it.

Why 1,000+ marketers, researchers, and developers choose this tool

How It Works

Step 1: Paste Your URLs

{
  "youtubeUrl": [
    { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }
  ]
}

Step 2: Configure (Optional)

• Clean transcript: Remove "um", "uh", filler words
• Include timestamps: Get second-by-second text timing
• Extract comments: Pull top comments with replies (NEW!)

Step 3: Get Your Data

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "Video_title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
  "Views": "1,234,567,890 views",
  "transcriptText": "We're no strangers to love...",
  "channel": {
    "name": "Rick Astley",
    "subscribers": "3.2M subscribers"
  }
}

What You Can Do With This Data

📝 Content Creators & Marketers

• Repurpose videos into blogs - Extract transcript, feed to AI, generate 5 articles
• Create social media posts - Pull key quotes and timestamps
• Generate SEO-optimized content - Turn video content into searchable text
• Subtitle generation - Export timestamps for perfect captions

Real example: Marketing agency extracts 100 competitor videos weekly, identifies trending topics, creates counter-content. Result: 40% traffic increase in 3 months.

🔬 Researchers & Academics

• Analyze lecture content at scale - Process entire course catalogs
• Study speaking patterns - Extract timestamps for linguistic analysis
• Sentiment analysis - Feed transcripts into NLP models
• Citation extraction - Find and verify sources mentioned in videos

Real example: PhD student analyzed 500 TED Talks in 2 days instead of 6 months, discovered key patterns in successful presentations.

🤖 Developers & AI Teams

• Train chatbots - Use video transcripts as training data
• Build recommendation engines - Analyze content similarity
• Automated workflows - Trigger actions based on new videos
• Knowledge base creation - Convert video libraries into searchable databases

Real example: SaaS company built AI support bot using 1,000 tutorial video transcripts. Result: 60% reduction in support tickets.

📊 Business Intelligence

• Competitor monitoring - Track what competitors are saying
• Brand sentiment tracking - Analyze mentions across video content
• Market research - Extract insights from industry thought leaders
• Product feedback analysis - Process customer testimonial videos

Real example: E-commerce brand analyzes 200 review videos monthly, identifies pain points, improves product design. Result: 25% reduction in returns.

Complete Feature List

Core Extraction

• ✅ Full video transcripts with cleaned text
• ✅ Precise second-by-second timestamps
• ✅ Video metadata (title, views, likes, date)
• ✅ Channel information (name, subscribers, verification)
• ✅ Thumbnail URLs (multiple resolutions)
• ✅ Video descriptions and tags
• ✅ Duration and word count analytics

Smart Processing

• ✅ 3 cleaning levels: None (raw), Mild (remove "um"/"uh"), Aggressive (conversational cleanup)
• ✅ Automatic deduplication: Never process the same video twice
• ✅ Batch processing: Handle 1 to 1000+ videos
• ✅ Error recovery: Auto-retry on temporary failures
• ✅ Multiple formats: All YouTube URL types (standard, shorts, live, youtu.be)

NEW: Comment Extraction

• ✅ Top comments with like counts
• ✅ Comment replies (configurable depth)
• ✅ Sort by "top" or "newest"
• ✅ Real-time streaming extraction
• ✅ Automatic resumption if interrupted

Export & Integration

• ✅ JSON, CSV, Excel download
• ✅ Direct API access
• ✅ Webhook integration
• ✅ Pre-configured data views
• ✅ Apify platform integration

Input Configuration

Basic Example (Just Transcripts)

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

Advanced Example (With Comments)

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

All Parameters

💡 Pro tip: Start with maxRepliesPerComment: 0 for 10x faster extraction if you don't need reply threads.

Output Structure

What You Get for Every Video

{
  "videoId": "1TThGG6guf0",
  "VideoURL": "https://youtu.be/1TThGG6guf0",
  "Video_title": "WordPress Custom Widget Development Tutorial",
  "published_Date": "Aug 12, 2020",
  "Views": "5,067 views",
  "likes": "122",
  
  "channel": {
    "name": "Codeytek Academy",
    "id": "UC0SDxbLAqoKLACyEPz2wXAg",
    "subscribers": "33.1K subscribers",
    "verified": false
  },
  
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1TThGG6guf0/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "Description": "Learn how to create custom WordPress widgets...",
  
  "hasTranscript": true,
  "transcriptText": "Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of advanced WordPress theme development. Today we're going to learn how to create custom widgets...",
  
  "timestamps": [
    { "time": "0:08", "text": "hello and welcome everyone to another" },
    { "time": "0:10", "text": "episode of advanced wordpress theme" },
    { "time": "0:12", "text": "development today we're going to learn" }
  ],
  
  "wordCount": 2847,
  "estimatedDuration": "11:23"
}

With Comments Enabled

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "Video_title": "Never Gonna Give You Up",
  "transcriptText": "We're no strangers to love...",
  
  "commentsExtracted": true,
  "commentCount": 50,
  "comments": [
    {
      "commentId": "UgxQe-6VK3h-LZaul6x4AaABAg",
      "authorName": "@musiclover2024",
      "text": "Still the best song after all these years!",
      "likeCount": "1,543",
      "replyCount": 12,
      "publishedTime": "2 days ago",
      "replies": [
        {
          "commentId": "UgxQe-6VK3h-LZaul6x4AaABAg.9kF7...",
          "authorName": "@throwback90s",
          "text": "Facts! Never gets old.",
          "likeCount": "234",
          "publishedTime": "1 day ago"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Pricing & Performance

Transcript Extraction

• Free mode: 5-10 seconds per video
• Paid mode: 3-5 seconds per video (faster infrastructure)
• Cost: ~$0.001-0.006 per video (depending on length)

Comment Extraction (Optional Add-on)

Uses YouTube Comments Scraper in Standby Mode.

Pricing:

• Actor start: $0.001 (once per run)
• Parent comments: $0.003 each
• Replies: $0.0015 each

Example cost for 50 comments + 100 replies:

• Start: $0.01
• Comments: 50 × $0.003 = $0.15
• Replies: 100 × $0.0015 = $0.15
• Total: $0.31

With Apify subscription discounts:

• Bronze: 50% off → $0.17 total
• Silver: 67% off → $0.13 total
• Gold: 73% off → $0.11 total

Speed impact:

• Without replies: +5-10 seconds per video
• With replies (10 per comment): +20-40 seconds per video

💡 Cost optimization tip: Set maxRepliesPerComment: 0 if you don't need reply threads - you'll get 10x faster extraction and cut costs in half.

Supported YouTube URL Formats

We handle ALL YouTube URL types:

✅ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
✅ https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
✅ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
✅ https://www.youtube.com/live/VIDEO_ID
✅ https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID (no www)
✅ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID (mobile)

Just paste any YouTube link - we'll figure it out.

Pre-Configured Data Views

Save time with our built-in export templates:

1. 📊 Full Dataset

Everything - Complete metadata, transcripts, timestamps, analytics
Use for: Comprehensive analysis, data warehousing

2. 📝 Transcripts Only

Focus: Transcript text, timestamps, word count, duration
Use for: Content repurposing, subtitle generation

3. 📺 Channel Analytics

Focus: Channel info, subscribers, verification, video list
Use for: Influencer research, competitor analysis

Quick Start Examples

Use Case 1: Content Repurposing

Goal: Turn video into blog post

// 1. Extract transcript
const input = {
  youtubeUrl: [{ url: "YOUR_VIDEO_URL" }],
  cleaningLevel: "aggressive",
  includeTimestamps: false
};

// 2. Run actor
// 3. Get output: feed transcriptText to ChatGPT/Claude
// 4. Generate 5 blog posts in 2 minutes

Use Case 2: Competitor Analysis

Goal: Analyze 100 competitor videos

const input = {
  youtubeUrl: [
    { url: "competitor_video_1" },
    { url: "competitor_video_2" },
    // ... paste 100 URLs
  ],
  cleaningLevel: "mild",
  extractcomments: true,
  maxComments: 20
};

// Export to Excel → Analyze trends → Find content gaps

Use Case 3: AI Training Data

Goal: Build chatbot training dataset

const input = {
  youtubeUrl: YOUR_PLAYLIST_URLS, // from our Playlist Extractor
  cleaningLevel: "none", // keep raw data for AI
  includeTimestamps: true
};

// Process 1000 videos → Clean dataset → Train model

Integration Examples

JavaScript/Node.js

const ApifyClient = require('apify-client');

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_API_TOKEN' });

const input = {
  youtubeUrl: [
    { url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }
  ],
  cleaningLevel: "mild"
};

const run = await client.actor("dz_omar/youtube-transcript-metadata-extractor").call(input);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

console.log(items[0].transcriptText);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('YOUR_API_TOKEN')

run_input = {
    "youtubeUrl": [
        { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }
    ],
    "cleaningLevel": "mild"
}

run = client.actor("dz_omar/youtube-transcript-metadata-extractor").call(run_input=run_input)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item['transcriptText'])

cURL (Direct API)

curl -X POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/dz_omar~youtube-transcript-metadata-extractor/runs \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -d '{
    "youtubeUrl": [
      { "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }
    ]
  }'

→ View full API documentation

Frequently Asked Questions

Technical Details

// Auto-retry logic
const MAX_RETRIES = 3;
const BACKOFF_MS = [1000, 3000, 9000];

try {
  await extractTranscript(videoId);
} catch (error) {
  if (retries < MAX_RETRIES) {
    await sleep(BACKOFF_MS[retries]);
    // retry...
  }
}

Comparison: Why Choose This Actor?

Trust & Reliability

Platform Performance

• ✅ Actor running smoothly - 100% success rate
• ✅ Regular updates - Maintained actively

Legal & Compliance

What You Should Know

✅ What's allowed:

• Extracting public transcripts for personal use
• Research and academic analysis
• Business intelligence and market research
• Content repurposing with proper attribution

⚠️ What requires caution:

• Large-scale commercial redistribution
• Republishing copyrighted video content
• Using data in ways that violate YouTube's ToS
• Scraping private or restricted content

🔒 Privacy & Data:

• We only extract publicly visible data
• No authentication or login required
• No data stored beyond your run duration
• GDPR compliant (EU users)

Disclaimer: This tool extracts publicly available data. Users are responsible for ensuring their usage complies with YouTube's Terms of Service, copyright laws, and applicable regulations. We are not lawyers - consult legal counsel for commercial use cases.

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→ Use together: Playlist → Transcript Extractor = Full channel analysis

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→ Use together: Channel Scraper → Transcript Extractor = Creator deep-dive

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Standalone comment extraction with advanced filtering. Perfect for sentiment analysis.
→ Integrated in this actor - enable with extractcomments: true

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Get Started Now

Free Trial Available

No credit card required. Test with 5$ to see the quality yourself.

💬 Get Support

Need Help?

📧 Email: [email protected]
🌐 Website: flowextractapi.com
🐦 Twitter: @FlowExtractAPI
💼 LinkedIn: flowextract-api

Response time: Within 24 hours (usually much faster)