YouTube Transcripts — Subtitles Without the Token Wall

YouTube Transcripts — Subtitles Without the Token Wall

Get the transcript of any public YouTube video: full text, language, whether it is auto-generated, and segment count.

The wall that is not a wall

YouTube's caption endpoint now answers HTTP 200 with a zero-byte body unless the request carries a proof-of-origin token. Fetching timedtext directly looks like success and returns nothing:

captionTracks present in the watch page   ✓
timedtext?fmt=json3                       → 200, 0 bytes
timedtext?fmt=vtt                         → 200, 0 bytes

yt-dlp negotiates that token with the player, so it still reads captions. This Actor runs it, pinned to a tested version, and parses the json3 track it writes.

Manual captions win

If a video has both, the human-written track is used and isAuto is false. Auto-generated captions are used only when nothing else exists, and say so — they have no punctuation guarantees.

What you get

Field	Example
title	Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
language / isAuto	en · false
segmentCount / wordCount	61 · 487
transcript	the full text, one block
durationSecs	213

Use cases

• Content repurposing — transcript in, article or summary out.
• Research — search what a channel actually said.
• Accessibility — a text copy of a video.
• LLM input — transcripts as a dataset instead of a video.

Limits

• Public videos only. Private, age-gated or members-only videos report their reason per video.
• One language per run — the requested one, or the closest regional variant.
• Auto captions are machine text. isAuto tells you which you received.
• YouTube throttles. A 429 gets one patient retry; a persistent block is reported per video, not disguised as "no captions".

Verified

19 unit tests (id parsing from every URL shape, manual-over-auto selection, json3 parsing, empty events) and 12 live checks: a real video returning 61 segments and 487 words, plus a second video's metadata.

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Local build — transcripts verified against live YouTube, not published.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• YouTube Transcripts — Subtitles Without the Token Wall declares all 11 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of YouTube Transcripts include videoId, title, channel, durationSecs, language and isAuto.
• YouTube Transcripts needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• YouTube Transcripts needs 1 required input: videos.
• YouTube Transcripts documents isAuto as: True when the captions were machine-generated, false when a human wrote them.
• Every number published about YouTube Transcripts is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• YouTube Transcripts is filed under social media and developer tools so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• YouTube Transcripts reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.

FAQ

What does YouTube Transcripts return?

It returns 11 documented output fields — videoId, title, channel, durationSecs, language, isAuto, segmentCount and wordCount — each with a declared type and a written description. The full schema is below.

What does YouTube Transcripts require to run?

videos is required. Everything else has a default.

Does YouTube Transcripts need an API key?

No. It reads only public data and asks for no account.

How is YouTube Transcripts billed?

Per result returned, on Apify. A run that returns nothing costs nothing. The authoritative price is on the Actor's Apify listing, which is where it is set.