YouTube Transcript API: Get Any Video Transcript as Markdown

YouTube’s official Data API permits caption downloads only for videos the requester can edit, with a quota cost that limits its usefulness for retrieving public transcripts, while unofficial tools such as the Python youtube-transcript-api can access public and auto-generated captions but may be blocked from cloud-hosted IP addresses and require proxy infrastructure. Context.dev presents its Scrape endpoint as a hosted alternative that accepts various YouTube video URLs, automatically selects available caption tracks, manages proxy routing, and returns Markdown containing video metadata, descriptions, and timestamped transcripts; it also returns metadata when captions are unavailable and can provide channel profiles for channel URLs. The service supports additional output options such as query-based highlights for relevant transcript passages and JSON extraction into user-defined fields, positioning the same API as a way to process YouTube alongside other web content. An example cited in the text reports that scraping Andrej Karpathy’s hour-long LLM talk took about five seconds, used one credit, and produced approximately 70,000 characters of Markdown.

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