How can I download .srt subtitle files and the videos themselves with YouTube Scraper?
Hi folks, I'm testing out the YouTube Scraper and can't for the life of me figure out two things:
1. How do I download/export the .srt subtitle files of a run? I can only get the subs to show in an Excel column when exporting as Excel or CSV. Is there a way to get the separate .srt files (or, ideally, .txt files) of the subs?
2. The intro to the product suggests you can also download the videos themselves, not just info about them ("YouTube crawler and video scraper" - https://apify.com/bernardo/youtube-scraper#what-does-youtube-scraper-do) - but I can't find a way to do this. Is it possible, or have I misinterpreted the tool's capacity?
Thanks.
Apify
Scrape YouTube channels and videos · Apify
YouTube crawler and video scraper. Alternative YouTube API with no limits or quotas. Extract and download channel name, likes, number of views, and number of subscribers.
3 Replies
provincial-silver•3y ago
1. The srt files are stored in the KV store but I agree we should add a link for simplicity. See
https://console.apify.com/view/runs/ZpWqLMFZEajHBugQQ
2. It doesn't download the video. It is technically possible though but it is probably not something Apify wants to advertise.
fascinating-indigoOP•3y ago
Thanks Lukas. Good to know. Some follow-up questions:
1. I'm using this scraper specifically because it has a UI that doesn't require coding knowledge, so I'm unclear where the KV story is. Firstly, am I right to assume that I needed to have turned on the "Save subtitles to key-value store" option for this to work, and all the runs I've done without that won't have seperate .srt files even though I selected the "Save subtitles" option? Secondly, where do I find the KV store to get the .srt files? I've googled and read the Apify documentation but can't find an answer.
2. Ok, no worries. Thanks.
A new issue:
3. I'm testing the tool for academic research purposes, with the intention of purchasing it if it meets our team's needs. However, I'm facing a significant issue. When I scrape a channel, it doesn't consistently scrape the whole thing – e.g., I'm trying to scrape one with over 200 videos, but it only scrapes 89. It did the same with another channel. Each run, I therefore have to manually check and count videos, then rerun the scraper if needed, which is not viable for bulk research. Any idea why this may be happening and if it can be resolved?
Thanks very much.
Replying to tag you, as it didn't tag properly in the above reply
provincial-silver•3y ago
1. Key Value Store is under the Storage tab inside the run
3. Can you please share your input? I will check it with the dev