Youtube Transcript API for Channels and Playlists

Expand upon the youtube-transcript-api and allow users to easily request all of a channel's (or a playlist's) video caption data. This will require use of Youtube Data API v3.

Install

It is recommended to install this with pip

pip install youtube_channel_transcript_api

If you install from source, you will have to install the dependencies from the Pipfile with pipenv install For more information on pipenv see here

API

Integrate this package into your python 3.6+ application. It is built as a sort of expansion youtube-transcript-api. For that reason, that package's warnings/use cases mostly apply to this project as well.

The package revolves around creating YoutubeTranscripts objects, and then using them to obtain all of the caption data from that channel/playlist's videos. This package also is built on the YouTube Data API v3, which means to use this you will need to setup your own account and use your own API Key. See here for directions how to setup your account if you don't have one.

There are two types of YoutubeTranscripts objects, YoutubeChannelTranscripts and YoutubePlaylistTranscripts

To iniitialze a YoutubePlaylistTranscripts object, you would call like

YoutubePlaylistTranscripts(<playlist name>, <playlist id>, <youtube data api key>)

To initialize a YoutubeChannelTranscipts object, you would call like

YoutubeChannelTranscripts(<youtube channel name>, <youtube data api key>)

Note: A YoutubeChannelTranscripts object basically searches youtube for the top 5 channels closest to the given name and uses the top match. It creates a YoutubePlaylistTranscripts object with the data it gets back, so the rest of the two classes' functionality are identical.

You can then either call get_transcripts() to return a dictionary of all transcripts and a list of videos that errored, or you can call write_transcripts() to write out all of the transcripts to json files at the filepath location.

Here is an example where the package fetches all transcript data from a channel using get_transcripts():

from youtube_channel_transcript_api import YoutubeChannelTranscripts

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_data, videos_errored = channel_getter.get_transcripts()

In this instance, videos_data will look like

{
 'video id 1': 
	{ 'title': 'videos title 1',
	  'captions': [
			{
				'text': 'Hey there',
				'start': 7.58,
				'duration': 6.13
			},
			{
				'text': 'how are you',
				'start': 14.08,
				'duration': 7.58
			},
			# ...
		]
	},
 'video id 2': 
	{ 'title': 'videos title 2',
	  'captions': [
			{
				'text': 'Hola there',
				'start': 5.1,
				'duration': 6.13
			},
			{
				'text': 'how are I',
				'start': 12.08,
				'duration': 3.58
			},
			# ...
		]
	},
 #...
}

And videos_errored will look like

[ ['bad video title 1', 'bad video id 1'], ['bad video title 2', 'bad video id 2'] ]

Write Transcripts

The function write_transcripts() will write each transcript out to file in json format. It has one required parameter, file_path, which is where the function will create the directories and files necessary. It writes all the files to the same location. Each file is named after the video's title. It returns a list of videos that have errored, in the format above.

An example would be

from youtube_channel_transcript_api import YoutubeChannelTranscripts

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_errored = channel_getter.write_transcripts('/home/user/blah/here/') # don't forget to have that last /

Shared Parameters

Both get_transcripts() and write_transcripts() have the same, optional parameters.

Languages

youtube-channel-transcripts-api supports users trying to get their desired language from a channel's videos. To do this you can add a languages parameter to the call (it defaults to english).

You can also add the languages param if you want to make sure the transcripts are retrieved in your desired language (it defaults to english).

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_data, videos_errored = channel_getter.get_transcripts(languages=['de', 'en'])

It's a list of language codes in a descending priority. In this example it will first try to fetch the german transcript ('de') and then fetch the english transcript ('en') if it fails to do so.

Cookies

Some videos are age restricted, so this module won't be able to access those videos without some sort of authentication. To do this, you will need to have access to the desired video in a browser. Then, you will need to download that pages cookies into a text file. You can use the Chrome extension cookies.txt or the Firefox extension cookies.txt.

Once you have that, you can use it with the module to access age-restricted videos' captions like so.

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_data, videos_errored = channel_getter.get_transcripts(cookies='/path/to/your/cookies.txt')

Proxies

You can specify a https/http proxy, which will be used during the requests to YouTube:

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_data, videos_errored = channel_getter.get_transcripts(proxies={"http": "http://user:pass@domain:port", "https": "https://user:pass@domain:port"})  

As the proxies dict is passed on to the requests.get(...) call, it follows the format used by the requests library.

Just Text

You can specify for the responses to not include timestamp information in the videos_data returned, or in the files written out to memory. By default, just_text is set to False

channel_getter = YoutubeChannelTranscripts('A Youtube Channel', 'Youtube Data API Key here')

videos_data, videos_errored = channel_getter.get_transcripts(just_text=True)

In this example, videos_data will now look like

{
 'video id 1': 
	{ 'title': 'videos title 1',
	  'captions': 'Hey there how are you ...',
	},
 'video id 2': 
	{ 'title': 'videos title 2',
	  'captions': 'Hola there how are I ...',
	},
 #...
}

Warning

This code, in part, uses an undocumented part of the YouTube API, which is called by the YouTube web-client. So there is no guarantee that it won't stop working tomorrow if they change how things work. It also uses the Youtube Data API v3, so it is up to you that you are following all of that API's rules. In addition, you will have to worry about managing your own Quota for the YouTube Data API, its resource for limiting calls.