YouTube Full Channel Transcripts

Extract transcripts from all videos in a YouTube channel for free (no paid APIs). Uses yt-dlp to discover videos and fetch available subtitles. Saves combined transcripts as structured JSON or CSV.

Free, local alternative to Apify actor — no third-party paid APIs.

Fetches all videos from a YouTube channel (or playlist), extracts available transcripts (auto-generated or manual), and exports to JSON/CSV.

When to Use

• "Get all transcripts from channel X"
• "Export channel Y's video subtitles"
• "Build dataset of all videos from creator Z"

Prerequisites

• yt-dlp installed (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp)
• jq installed (for JSON processing)
• Internet connection

Usage

bash

# Basic: fetch all transcripts from a channel
youtube_full_channel_transcripts channel_url="https://www.youtube.com/@SomeChannel" output_format="json"

# With filters
youtube_full_channel_transcripts channel_url="https://www.youtube.com/c/ChannelName" max_videos=50 languages="en" include_auto_generated=true

Options

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
channel_url	string	yes	YouTube channel URL, handle, or playlist URL
output_format	string	no	Output format: json (default) or csv
max_videos	integer	no	Limit number of videos to process (default: all)
languages	string	no	Comma-separated language codes (e.g., en,es). Default: en
include_auto_generated	boolean	no	Include auto-generated transcripts? (default: true)
output_dir	string	no	Directory to save results (default: workspace/exports/youtube-transcripts)

Output

• transcripts.json or transcripts.csv — structured data with:

  json

  {
    "video_id": "abc123",
    "title": "Video Title",
    "url": "https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc123",
    "upload_date": "20240322",
    "duration": 360,
    "language": "en",
    "transcript": "Full text...",
    "is_auto_generated": false
  }
  

• Summary printed to console: number of videos processed, success/failure counts.

Implementation Details

1. Discovery: yt-dlp --flat-playlist -J to list all videos
2. Transcript fetch: yt-dlp --write-subs --sub-format srt --skip-download per video
3. Parsing: Extract SRT subtitles and convert to plain text
4. Combine: Aggregate results into JSON/CSV

Errors & Retries

• If a video has no available transcript, it's skipped (logged)
• Network errors: retry up to 3 times with backoff
• Rate limiting: yt-dlp handles automatically; can add --sleep-interval if needed

Notes

• Respect YouTube's rate limits. The tool includes small delays by default.
• Large channels (100+ videos) may take a while; use max_videos to limit.
• Auto-generated transcripts are more available but less accurate.