What is apify-youtube-transcript-scraper?

A tool that retrieves text transcripts and captions from public YouTube videos, channels, or playlists. It can provide timestamps, subtitle files such as SRT or VTT, and translated transcripts; bioRxiv-like research is not involved here—YouTube is a video platform.

Use it to summarise videos, extract quotations, export subtitles, or research transcripts from videos, channels, and playlists. It does not download video or audio, search YouTube, or read comments.

It avoids manually watching videos or copying captions when you need searchable text. Timestamps make it easier to find or cite an exact point in a video.

apify-youtube-transcript-scraper — Skill for Claude Code by iradoweck

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills --skill apify-youtube-transcript-scraper

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agentic-awesome-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 255 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,304 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00048	$0.02304
Opus 5.5	$0.00019	$0.00922
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00010	$0.00461
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00230

Measured today against content hash 85cb19c1eb3f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apify-youtube-transcript-scraper scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured today.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to apify-youtube-transcript-scraper — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/agentic-awesome-skills-claude/skills/apify-youtube-transcript-scraper/SKILL.md · 186 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 186 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube Transcript Scraper

Turn a YouTube link, a channel or a playlist into text with one run of harshmaur/youtube-transcript-scraper. Each video gives one row with the transcript and the video facts. The agent picks the input list, sets how many videos to read per channel, and chooses the transcript shape.

Disclosure: the Actor is paid per result and is built by the skill author. Links carry no affiliate parameters.

When to Use

Use to summarize public YouTube videos, find timestamped quotations, export captions, or research transcripts from channels and playlists.

Example prompts

Prompts this skill handles:

"Summarize https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw in five bullet points."
"Give me SRT subtitles for these three videos."
"Pull the transcripts of the last 20 videos from @mkbhd and list every product he reviewed."
"Transcripts of this playlist, in Spanish, with timestamps so I can link to the exact second."

Out of scope (the boundary):

"Download the MP4" or "get the audio" — this Actor returns text and metadata only.
"Find videos about X" — it does not search YouTube. Get the video, channel or playlist links first.
"Read the comments" — use a YouTube comments Actor.

Prerequisites

Apify account (sign up). The free plan's monthly credit pays for about 1,000 transcripts.
Authentication via one of:
- apify login (OAuth, if you use the Apify CLI)
- APIFY_TOKEN environment variable
- Token from Apify Console → Settings → Integrations
A previously installed and reviewed Apify CLI, or the Apify MCP server (see "Calling the Actor").

Workflow

Step 1 — Pick the input list

The user gives you	Field	Notes
Video links: `watch?v=`, `youtu.be/`, `/shorts/`, `/live/`	`videoUrls`	One row per link. `maxVideos` does not apply.
A channel: `@handle`, `youtube.com/@handle`, `/channel/UC…`, `/c/Name`	`channelUrls`	The newest uploads, up to `maxVideos` per channel.
A playlist: `youtube.com/playlist?list=…`	`playlistUrls`	Playlist order, up to `maxVideos`; about 100 at most.

Read the full file on GitHub · 186 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

references/gotchas.md 2.3 KB

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

today First seen · 186 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 85cb19c1eb3f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apify-youtube-transcript-scraper is a skill published in the GitHub repository iradoweck/antigravity-awesome-skills (30 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 2,304 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to apify-youtube-transcript-scraper, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Research apify captions data transcripts youtube

apify-youtube-transcript-scraper