Official JavaScript/TypeScript client for the yTranscript API — reliable YouTube transcript extraction without IP bans, proxy management, or player-response scraping.

No IP bans — the managed extraction layer absorbs YouTube's bot detection for you
Captionless videos work — automatic Whisper speech-to-text fallback
Simple, typed — one method, structured segments, zero dependencies

Install

npm install ytranscript-api

Quickstart

import { YTranscript } from "ytranscript-api";

const yt = new YTranscript("yk_live_...");   // get a key at ytranscript.com/developers

const t = await yt.transcript("dQw4w9WgXcQ");        // video ID or any YouTube URL
console.log(t.lang);                                  // "en"
console.log(t.segments[0]);                           // { text, offset, duration }
console.log(t.text);                                  // full transcript as one string

console.log(yt.lastQuota);                            // { limit, used, rateLimitRemaining }

Options

await yt.transcript("https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ", { lang: "es" });

new YTranscript(key, { timeoutMs: 60_000 });

Error handling

import { YTranscriptError } from "ytranscript-api";

try {
  await yt.transcript(videoId);
} catch (err) {
  if (err instanceof YTranscriptError) {
    err.code;    // "no_transcript" | "quota_exceeded" | "rate_limited" | ...
    err.status;  // HTTP status
  }
}