YouTube Transcript Scraper

Download All YouTube Channel Transcripts in One Click

A simple, API-key–only Python script that downloads every available transcript from a single YouTube channel and combines them into one text file for downstream NLP, search, or archival.

Author: Vladislav Virtonen Year: 2025

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✨ Features

Feature	Details
No OAuth	Works with a lightweight YouTube Data API v3 key.
Channel-wide	Iterates through all public videos on a channel.
Titles included	Each transcript section is headed with the video title.
Plain text output	Easy to index, grep, or feed into LLMs.
Minimal dependencies	Only two pip installs.

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Need every caption or subtitle from a YouTube channel without copying them one by one?
This tool automates the entire process: point it at any channel, and it downloads all available transcripts at once—manual or auto-generated—ready for NLP, archives, or personal study.

📂 Repository Contents

├── youtube_transcript_downloader.py   # Main script (fully documented)
└── README.md                          # You are here

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🚀 Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/<yourusername>/youtube-transcript-scraper.git
cd youtube-transcript-scraper
pip install -r requirements.txt  # or see “Dependencies” below
python youtube_transcript_downloader.py

After the script finishes you will find:

all_transcripts.txt

Each section looks like:

========== [Title] ==========

[transcript] ...

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🔑 Prerequisites

Item	Notes
Python ≥ 3.8	Tested on 3.8–3.12
YouTube Data API v3 key	Free in Google Cloud Console
Channel ID	Begins with UC… (see next section)

1 · Obtain an API Key

1. Open Google Cloud Console → APIs & Services → New Project.
2. In API Library, enable YouTube Data API v3.
3. Go to Credentials → Create Credentials → API Key.
4. (Optional) Restrict it to “YouTube Data API v3” only.

2 · Find the Channel ID

Method A – Fast Online : Paste https://www.youtube.com/@channel into any online “YouTube Channel ID Finder”.

Method B – Manual (no third-party tools)

1. Open the channel page in Chrome/Firefox.

2. Right-click → View Page Source.

3. Press Ctrl/Cmd + F and search for

   "channelId":
   

4. Copy the value that looks like UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

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⚙️ Configuration & Execution

Open youtube_transcript_downloader.py and fill in:

API_KEY   = "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
CHANNEL_ID = "UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Then run:

python youtube_transcript_downloader.py

The script will:

1. List every video on the channel (50 per page, auto-paginated).
2. Fetch the transcript (manual or auto-generated) via youtube-transcript-api.
3. Write them to all_transcripts.txt, with clear title headers.

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🪄 Dependencies

pip install google-api-python-client youtube-transcript-api

(Alternatively use pip install -r requirements.txt if you add one.)

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😎 Contributing / Forking

Feel free to fork and PR:

• Add JSON/CSV export
• Push transcripts to Google Drive or S3
• Rate-limit handling for very large channels
• Language fallback chains

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📜 License

MIT License – see LICENSE if added.

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🙏 Acknowledgements

• google-api-python-client – official YouTube Data API wrapper.
• youtube-transcript-api – elegant caption fetcher by @jdepoix.

Happy scraping! 🎬📝