YouTube

YouTube Shorts Transcript API

Transcript for a YouTube Short — rejects long-form videos (≤3 min only).

Same caption engine as YouTube Transcript (published captions only — not speech-to-text), scoped to Shorts. Pass a youtube.com/shorts/… URL (or a watch URL that is actually a Short). Videos longer than 3 minutes return HTTP 422 — use /v1/youtube/transcript for those. Caption-miss 404 uses the same diagnostic body and charges 0. Flat 1 credit on success.

Docs: https://captapi.com/apis/youtube-shorts-transcript

get/v1/youtube/shorts/transcript

Request

  • Base URL: https://api.captapi.com
  • URL: https://api.captapi.com/v1/youtube/shorts/transcript
  • Auth: one of:
    • HTTP bearer
    • API key in header X-API-Key

Query parameters

urlstring required

Public YouTube Shorts URL, e.g. https://youtube.com/shorts/ID (≤3 min). Long-form videos return HTTP 422 — use the matching /v1/youtube/… endpoint instead. The URL platform must match this endpoint's platform. Do not pass cross-platform URLs, e.g. YouTube to TikTok, Instagram to Facebook, LinkedIn to X/Twitter, or Pinterest to Rumble.

languagestring

Preferred caption language as an ISO code, e.g. "en". Defaults to auto-detect.

cacheboolean

Set true to serve from the 24h response cache (0 credits on hit). Default false — always fetch fresh.

Response

Success. The data object for this endpoint.

successunknown required

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 3 revisions of this API.