YouTube Transcript API – Captions, Timestamps & Metadata

Extract public YouTube transcripts with timestamps, language selection, caption type, and video metadata. Use this Actor when you need a YouTube transcript API, YouTube captions API, or transcript data for RAG, research, summarization, indexing, and AI-agent workflows without managing the YouTube Data API.

What you get

• full transcript text
• timestamped transcript segments
• detected or selected language
• caption type where available
• video title and source URL
• normalized metadata for downstream pipelines

Export JSON, CSV, or Excel; consume results through the Apify API; or connect schedules, webhooks, Make, n8n, and AI workflows.

Common workflows

YouTube transcript API

Use the Actor as an API layer when an application needs transcript text or timestamped caption segments for public videos.

YouTube transcripts for RAG

Send normalized transcript rows into chunking, embedding, search, or retrieval pipelines while preserving source URLs and timestamps.

Video research and summarization

Collect transcript data first, then pass the dataset to your preferred LLM for summaries, topic extraction, question answering, or structured research.

AI-agent tool via MCP

Expose the Actor through Apify's hosted MCP server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "signal-lab-youtube": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=signal_lab/youtube-transcript-scraper"
    }
  }
}

After Apify's OAuth flow, try: “Get the English transcript with timestamps for this YouTube URL and return source segments for a RAG pipeline.”

See the official Apify MCP guide for supported clients and authentication options.

Output and responsible use

Results are written to the default dataset and can be exported or fetched programmatically. Only process public content you are authorized to use and follow YouTube's terms, privacy rules, copyright requirements, and applicable law.