YouTube transcript — POST /v1/youtube/transcript

The track list comes from InnerTube player with YouTube's iOS client (ANDROID as fallback) — the web client's tracks are token-gated — and the track itself from YouTube's timedtext JSON. lang picks the track (creator captions over auto-generated; omit for English, else YouTube's default). Entities are decoded, line breaks become spaces, empty cues are dropped. A video without captions, or without a track in lang, is a 404 (not charged); an age-gated video is a 404 that says so. Machine translation (tlang) is not offered: YouTube answered it with HTTP 429 on every measured attempt.

Request

POSThttps://api.scrapercompany.com/v1/youtube/transcript

Authenticate with your API key in the x-api-key header (see Authentication).

Body

JSON object. Unknown fields are rejected with 422.

video_idstringrequiredmin length 11, max length 300
The 11-character video id (8jPQjjsBbIc) or any YouTube video URL: watch?v=, youtu.be/, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/. Ids come from POST /v1/youtube/search (videos[].video_id).
langstring | nullmin length 2, max length 20, pattern ^[A-Za-z]{2,3}(?:-[A-Za-z0-9]{2,8})*$
Caption language code (en, pt-BR). Creator captions win over auto-generated ones; en also matches en-GB. Omit for English when the video has it, else YouTube's default track. A language the video has no track in is a 404 that lists the ones it has.
hlstringdefault enpattern ^[A-Za-z]{2,3}(?:-[A-Za-z0-9]{2,4})?$
Interface language YouTube localizes texts in (hl): relative dates, view-count wording, caption track names. Counts parse to integers only for English-style numbers.
glstringdefault USpattern ^[A-Za-z]{2}$
Content country (gl), two letters.

Example request

curl -X POST "https://api.scrapercompany.com/v1/youtube/transcript" \
  -H "x-api-key: $SCRAPERCOMPANY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "video_id": "8jPQjjsBbIc"
  }'

Response

200 — One caption track as timed segments. Metered responses carry x-credits-charged and x-credits-remaining headers (see credit headers).

200 response

{
  "search_parameters": {
    "engine": "youtube_transcripts",
    "video_id": "8jPQjjsBbIc",
    "hl": "en",
    "gl": "US"
  },
  "video": {
    "video_id": "8jPQjjsBbIc",
    "title": "How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed | Daniel Levitin | TED",
    "channel_id": "UCAuUUnT6oDeKwE6v1NGQxug",
    "author": "TED",
    "length_seconds": 740
  },
  "language": {
    "code": "en",
    "name": "English",
    "kind": "manual",
    "translatable": true,
    "is_default": true
  },
  "available_languages": [
    {
      "code": "ar",
      "name": "Arabic",
      "kind": "manual",
      "translatable": true,
      "is_default": false
    },
    {
      "code": "en",
      "name": "English",
      "kind": "manual",
      "translatable": true,
      "is_default": true
    }
  ],
  "segments": [
    {
      "start_s": 13.24,
      "duration_s": 2.56,
      "text": "A few years ago, I broke into my own house."
    },
    {
      "start_s": 16.88,
      "duration_s": 1.216,
      "text": "I had just driven home,"
    }
  ],
  "text": "A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter,",
  "meta": {
    "source": "youtube",
    "client": "IOS",
    "wire_bytes": 141794,
    "elapsed_s": 0.44
  }
}

Arrays are shortened to their first items.

Errors

Errors return a JSON body with a detail field. Failed requests are not charged. See Errors for the full list and retry advice.

Status	Meaning	Retry?
`401`Unauthorized	Missing or invalid API key. `{"detail":"missing or invalid API key"}`	No, fix the request
`402`Payment Required	Not enough credits for this request. Only returned once credit enforcement is switched on; during the beta metering runs in shadow mode and never blocks. `{"detail":"insufficient credits: this request costs 5, 0 available. Credits renew 2026-11-01."}`	No, fix the request
`404`Not Found	The property, stay, job or record was not found. `{"detail":"job not found"}`	No, fix the request
`422`Unprocessable Content	Request validation failed. `detail` is a list of problems for schema errors, or a string for semantic checks performed by the endpoint. `{"detail":[{"loc":["body","name"],"msg":"Field required","type":"missing"}]}`	No, fix the request
`429`Too Many Requests	Too many requests: the key's requests-per-minute limit was exceeded, or (once credit enforcement is on) the plan's concurrent-request limit. No rate-limit or Retry-After headers are sent; back off and retry. `{"detail":"rate limit 60/min exceeded"}`	Yes, with backoff
`502`Bad Gateway	The upstream source failed, blocked the request or returned an unusable answer. Safe to retry later; failed requests are not charged. `{"detail":"RuntimeError"}`	Yes, with backoff
`503`Service Unavailable	Temporarily unavailable: a dependency of this endpoint is down, or the upstream source changed its contract. Retry later. `{"detail":"database unavailable: OperationalError"}`	Yes, with backoff

Try it

The quickest way: open this endpoint in Try it. It runs on your account with the example request filled in, shows the cost before you run, and shows the answer as a readable table next to the JSON and the code. Signed out? You sign in first and come straight back.

Export your key: export SCRAPERCOMPANY_API_KEY=sk_... (no key yet? request access).
Copy the cURL example above and run it in a terminal.
Or open the interactive playground on api.scrapercompany.com, paste your key and pick this endpoint.

Credits

2 credits per successful call (2 (an empty answer, an unknown or private video, and failed requests are free)). Failed, blocked and empty results are free. Credit metering is in beta and does not block requests yet.

Request#

Body#

Example request#

Response#

Errors#

Try it#