How to download the transcripts of every video on a YouTube channel

Why not one video at a time

On a video's page, “Show transcript” opens the captions in a side panel, which you can select and copy. For one video it works. For a channel of 500 videos it means 500 pages. The official YouTube Data API does not help either: downloading a caption track requires permission to edit the video, and costs 200 of a project's 10,000 daily quota units (details in our guide on the YouTube transcript API).

Choose what to read on the channel

Any form of the channel's address works: @lexfridman, https://www.youtube.com/@lexfridman, its /channel/UC… link. Then choose:

Several channels, playlists and single videos can go in the same run. A video that appears in two of them is transcribed and charged once.

One text file per video, in Python

import csv
import pathlib
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("quarra/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(run_input={
    "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@lexfridman"],
    "maxVideosPerSource": 10,
    "transcriptFormat": "text",
    "removeSoundTags": True,
})

folder = pathlib.Path("transcripts")
folder.mkdir(exist_ok=True)
with open(folder / "index.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    w.writerow(["videoId", "publishedAt", "title", "durationSeconds", "language", "wordCount", "status", "file"])
    videos = list(client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items())
    videos.sort(key=lambda v: v.get("position") or 0)  # records arrive as transcripts finish
    for v in videos:
        file = ""
        if v["status"] == "ok":
            file = f"{v['videoId']}.txt"
            (folder / file).write_text(v["transcript"], encoding="utf-8")
        w.writerow([v.get("videoId"), v.get("publishedAt"), v.get("title"), v.get("durationSeconds"),
                    v.get("language"), v.get("wordCount"), v["status"], file])
print(run.status, "->", folder.resolve())

Tested with apify-client 3.3 on October 10, 2026: 10 transcripts, from 2 to 5 hours of speech each, in a 57-second call. Some rows of the index it wrote:

A video without a transcript still gets its row, with its status (missing or error) and no file; its record says why, and it is free. With apify-client 2.x, write run["defaultDatasetId"] instead of run.default_dataset_id.

Keep the folder up to date

Turn on onlyNewVideos and schedule the Actor on Apify, daily or hourly: each run returns only the videos that earlier runs of the same watch did not deliver, and nothing is charged twice. A run with nothing new charges only its start fee. Give the watch a watchName to keep its memory when you change its channels.

{
  "urls": ["@lexfridman", "@hubermanlab"],
  "maxVideosPerSource": 10,
  "onlyNewVideos": true,
  "watchName": "podcasts",
  "transcriptFormat": "text",
  "removeSoundTags": true
}

Run the script above with that input: each run writes the files of the new episodes only, and an index of that run.

Limits

• It reads captions; it does not transcribe audio. A video without captions, such as many silent Shorts and some live streams, comes back as a free missing record.
• A run lasts at most its timeout, one hour by default. For a channel of thousands of videos, raise the timeout or cap the run with maxItems; a run that reaches its timeout keeps the transcripts it delivered and says so.
• Free records are not unlimited: a run that keeps meeting videos without a transcript stops early and says why. Split lists that have few captions.
• The Shorts tab shows no dates, so with publishedAfter Shorts come newest first and reading stops at the first older one.
• Age-restricted, members-only and paid videos need an account; we do not use one, so they come back as free error records.

What it costs

$5.00 per 1,000 transcripts on every Apify plan, plus a start fee of $0.005 per GB of memory per run ($0.005 at the default memory). A video over 10 hours counts once per 10 hours started; long podcasts under 10 hours count once. The 10 episodes above cost $0.055; a channel's latest 100 videos with transcripts, $0.505. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month.