A channel's back catalogue is hours of expert talk that search engines and AI tools never see. Turning it into text makes it searchable, quotable and ready for an AI knowledge base, show notes or a newsletter. Copying captions one video at a time does not scale, and the official API does not hand out other people's captions.
This guide gets you the transcript of every video in a channel, playlist or search, as clean text with timestamps, for $2.50 per 1,000 videos.
What you get
One row per video:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Title, channel, link | the video's details |
| Published, length, views | when, how long, how popular |
| Transcript | the full text |
| Segments | each caption line with its start time, for quoting or jumping to the moment |
| Caption language, auto-generated | which track was used, and whether it was typed by a person |
| Word count | 487 for a three-and-a-half-minute music video |
Videos without captions are listed in the run summary and are not charged.
Step 1: open the tool
Go to YouTube Transcript Scraper and click Try for free. No Apify account? Create one free; no card needed. The free plan returns up to 100 transcripts per run.
Step 2: paste a channel, playlist or videos
{
"videos": ["https://www.youtube.com/@YourChannel"],
"maxVideosPerSource": 50,
"languages": ["en"]
}Use a playlist link, single video links or searchQueries the same way. Ask for another language with translateTo.
Step 3: run and export
Click Start. A single video comes back in about a second. Export as JSON for an AI pipeline, or as CSV or Excel for reading.
New videos only, every week
Add "onlyNew": true, "monitorName": "my-channel" and schedule it weekly: each run returns only the videos earlier runs did not deliver. A ready n8n workflow puts them in a Google Sheet every Friday.
Ideas
- Feed a channel into a retrieval (RAG) knowledge base and answer questions with sources and timestamps.
- Turn talks into blog posts, show notes or newsletter quotes.
- Track what competitors and creators say about your product across their videos.