The youtube-transcript-api README says it plainly: YouTube blocks most IPs of cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure…), so on a server you get RequestBlocked or IpBlocked, and the fix is rotating residential proxies. This tool already runs on rotating residential IPs, so the same transcripts come back without buying or configuring proxies.
fetch()), SRT, VTT, Markdown, chunks.from apify_client import ApifyClient # pip install apify-client
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("fguiraud/youtube-transcript-scraper").call(run_input={
"videos": [
"dQw4w9WgXcQ"
],
"languages": [
"en"
],
"outputs": [
"segments"
]
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
for seg in item.get("segments", []):
print(seg)
No Python? Open the Actor page, paste your input in the form and press Start; results export to JSON, CSV or Excel.
Fields from a real run on 2026-09-26 (long values shortened):
{
"videoId": "QT3e6x5CZC8",
"status": "ok",
"title": "What if AI wasn’t a shortcut, but a learning partner? #TEDTalks",
"language": "en",
"isAutoGenerated": true,
"wordCount": 185,
"text": "A lot of the narrative, we saw that in the headlines, has been it's going to do the writing for kids, kids are not going to learn to write. But we are showing that there's ways that the AI doesn't write for you, it write..."
}
$0.003 per transcript, residential proxy included. With your own proxies the library is cheaper per call, but you maintain the proxy account and retries.
Do I need to change much code?
Replace the fetch() call with the client call above; segments has start, end and text.
What about videos without captions?
They return no-captions; turn on aiFallback to transcribe the audio.
Can an AI agent use it?
Yes. It is an MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fguiraud/youtube-transcript-scraper (listed in the official MCP registry), and there is an agent skill for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Field-name guesses such as url or urls are accepted.