TL;DR
- YouTube has no official transcript API for videos you don't own. The Data API's caption download requires edit permission on the video.
- The popular open-source
youtube-transcript-apiPython library works locally, but YouTube blocks most cloud provider IPs, so production use means buying and rotating residential proxies. - Context.dev handles this automatically. Send any YouTube video URL to the Scrape endpoint with Markdown enabled and you get the title, channel, duration, views, description, and a timestamped transcript back in one response.
Does YouTube have an official transcript API?
Not for public videos. The YouTube Data API has a captions.download method, but it "requires the user to have permission to edit the video." That makes it useful for a creator managing their own channel and useless for pulling a transcript from someone else's talk, tutorial, or earnings call. Each call also costs 200 quota units against the default 10,000 units per day, which caps you at about 50 downloads daily before you request more quota.
So developers who search for a YouTube transcript API usually end up choosing between two paths: run an unofficial library themselves, or call a hosted API.
The DIY route: youtube-transcript-api and the proxy problem
The youtube-transcript-api Python package is the most common answer. It calls the same internal endpoints the YouTube player uses, supports auto-generated captions, and needs no API key. On a laptop, it works well.
Deploy it, and things change. The library's own README warns that "YouTube has started blocking most IPs that are known to belong to cloud providers (like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, etc.)" and that you "will most likely run into RequestBlocked or IpBlocked exceptions." Its recommended fix is rotating residential proxies, with the caveat that a proxy "doesn't guarantee that you won't be blocked."
That leaves you owning a proxy contract, retry logic, block detection, and a parser for an undocumented API that changes without notice. For a team that just wants text from a video, that is a lot of infrastructure.
How Context.dev gets YouTube transcripts automatically
Context.dev treats YouTube as a page type it already understands. You don't call a separate transcript endpoint or pass a video ID. You scrape the URL, and the API recognizes it as a video.
Behind that single call, Context.dev:
- Detects the URL shape. Watch pages,
youtu.beshort links, Shorts, embeds, and live URLs all resolve to the same video. - Picks the best caption track. English author-provided captions come first, then English auto-generated, then other automatic tracks, then anything else available.
- Routes around YouTube's IP blocks. Requests escalate through a ladder of proxy exits, and a block that YouTube returns as a normal-looking response is caught instead of passed through as an empty transcript.
- Formats the transcript for reading. Caption fragments are merged into paragraphs with a
[m:ss]timestamp roughly every 30 seconds, so the result is easy to skim, cite, or chunk. - Fails soft. A video without accessible captions still returns its metadata and full description instead of an error.
Channel URLs (/@handle, /channel/, /c/, /user/) get the same treatment and return a channel profile with subscriber and video counts.
Get a YouTube transcript with one request
Here is the cURL version:
curl https://api.context.dev/v1/web/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $CONTEXT_DEV_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g",
"formats": { "markdown": true }
}'In Python:
import os
from context.dev import ContextDev
client = ContextDev(api_key=os.environ["CONTEXT_DEV_API_KEY"])
page = client.web.scrape(
url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g",
formats={"markdown": True},
)
if not page.markdown.success or page.markdown.data is None:
raise RuntimeError("Transcript scrape failed")
print(page.markdown.data)And in TypeScript:
import ContextDev from "context.dev";
const client = new ContextDev({ apiKey: process.env.CONTEXT_DEV_API_KEY });
const page = await client.web.scrape({
url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g",
formats: { markdown: true },
});
console.log(page.markdown.data);We ran that request on October 18, 2026 against Andrej Karpathy's one-hour "Intro to Large Language Models" talk. It returned in about 5 seconds, consumed 1 credit, and produced roughly 70,000 characters of Markdown. The top of the document looks like this (abridged):
# [1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models
**Channel**: Andrej Karpathy
**Duration**: 59:48
**Views**: 4,239,912
## Description
This is a 1 hour general-audience introduction to Large Language Models...
## Transcript
**[0:00]** hi everyone so recently I gave a 30-minute talk on large language models...
**[0:31]** hypothetical directory so for example working with a specific example...A youtu.be/zjkBMFhNj_g short link returned the same document. Because the output is plain Markdown with headings, you can drop it straight into an LLM prompt, split it on ## Transcript, or chunk it by timestamp for a RAG index. If you're tuning that step, our guide to HTML to clean Markdown for LLMs covers chunking and token budgets.
Ask a question instead of reading the whole transcript
An hour-long transcript can be more context than you want to spend. Add Highlights to the same request and Context.dev returns only the passages relevant to your question, with their timestamps:
{
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g",
"formats": { "highlights": true },
"highlightsParams": {
"query": "What is jailbreaking and how does it work?",
"maxCharacters": 800
}
}On the Karpathy talk, that returned a single passage starting at [50:49], where he explains how an optimized noise pattern in an image can jailbreak a model. The timestamp tells you exactly where to jump in the video, and the passage costs a fraction of the tokens.
You can also request JSON extraction on a video URL to turn the transcript into fields you define, such as a summary, speakers, or a list of products mentioned.
YouTube transcript API options compared
| YouTube Data API | youtube-transcript-api (Python) | Context.dev Scrape | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works on videos you don't own | No | Yes | Yes |
| Auto-generated captions | Only for your own videos | Yes | Yes |
| Runs reliably from cloud servers | Yes | Needs rotating residential proxies | Yes, proxies handled for you |
| Video metadata and description | Separate API calls | No | Included in the same response |
| Output | Caption files (SRT, VTT) | List of text segments | Markdown, Highlights, or JSON |
| Same API for other websites | No | No | Yes |
That last row matters if transcripts are one input among many. The same Scrape call that reads a YouTube video also reads docs pages, blogs, and JavaScript-heavy sites, so your pipeline has one client and one response shape.
FAQs
Does YouTube have an official transcript API?
Only for videos you can edit. The YouTube Data API's caption download method requires edit permission on the video and costs 200 of your 10,000 default daily quota units per call.
Can I get auto-generated YouTube captions through an API?
Yes. Context.dev falls back to auto-generated captions when no author-provided English track exists. The output format is identical either way, so your code handles both the same.
What happens if a video has no transcript?
The request still succeeds and returns the video's title, channel, duration, views, and description. Transcript availability depends on what YouTube exposes for the video, so check for a Transcript section before treating the result as complete.
Which YouTube URLs are supported?
Watch URLs, youtu.be links, Shorts, embeds, and live URLs for videos. Channel URLs using a handle, channel ID, custom name, or legacy username return a channel profile.
Can I choose the transcript language?
Not today. Context.dev selects the track automatically, preferring English author-provided captions, then English auto-generated, then other available tracks.
Start pulling YouTube transcripts
If you're maintaining a proxy pool just to read captions, you can replace it with one request. Create a free Context.dev account, grab an API key, and send your first YouTube URL to the Scrape endpoint. The YouTube videos guide has samples for Ruby, Go, and PHP too.