YouTube Transcript Scraper — agent skill and hosted MCP
Bring YouTube captions into research, notes and video summaries with the YouTube Transcript Scraper Apify Actor. Supply videos, channels or playlists and receive transcript text, timestamped segments, SRT or VTT, alongside video and channel metadata. Translation is optional.
A YouTube account is unnecessary. An Apify account pays for successful transcripts; videos without available captions do not incur a transcript charge.
Add the hosted tool
https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=harshmaur/youtube-transcript-scraper
Authenticate with an Apify sign-in in your MCP client or a Bearer token from Apify Integrations.
For Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http youtube-transcripts https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=harshmaur/youtube-transcript-scraper
Add the skill
/plugin install apify-youtube-transcript-scraper --marketplace harshmaur/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper
The same skill works with other agents that support skill packages:
npx skills add https://github.com/harshmaur/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper
Read the skill guide for input choices, transcript formats, language options, cost estimates and reporting missing captions.
Useful requests
- Summarize a video and link each quotation to its timestamp.
- Export captions from a playlist as SRT subtitles.
- Collect recent channel transcripts for notes or a searchable text collection.
- Translate available captions for a multilingual research project.
This Actor returns captions and metadata. It does not download audio or video, search YouTube by keyword, or create speech-to-text for a video without captions. Auto-generated captions can contain transcription mistakes.
Transcript pricing
On Apify's Free plan, 1,000 successful transcripts cost $5. Paid-plan rates are $4.00 to $4.67 per 1,000. The default maxVideos is 50 per channel or playlist; explicitly supplied video links are all included.
The hosted tool is published as io.github.harshmaur/youtube-transcript-scraper in the official MCP Registry.
For product questions, use the Actor Issues page.
The repo author builds this paid Actor. There are no affiliate links. The skill text and configuration are MIT licensed.