SDKs

YTAPI has official clients for Python and for JavaScript/TypeScript. Both are open source under the MIT license and have no runtime dependencies. They wrap the same HTTP API documented here, so anything you can do with curl you can do with them.

Quickstart

Create a key in the Developer Dashboard and set it as YTAPI_API_KEY. Both clients read it from the environment, or you can pass it in.

from ytapi import YTAPI

api = YTAPI()  # or YTAPI(api_key="sk_...")

transcript = api.get_transcript("dQw4w9WgXcQ")
for segment in transcript["segments"][:3]:
    print(segment["start"], segment["text"])

# Text formats (markdown, text, srt, vtt) come back as a string.
print(api.get_transcript("dQw4w9WgXcQ", format="markdown"))

import { YTAPI } from "@ytapi/sdk";

const api = new YTAPI(); // or new YTAPI({ apiKey: "sk_..." })

const transcript = await api.getTranscript("dQw4w9WgXcQ");
if (typeof transcript !== "string") {
  for (const segment of transcript.segments?.slice(0, 3) ?? []) {
    console.log(segment.start, segment.text);
  }
}

// Text formats (markdown, text, srt, vtt) come back as a string.
console.log(await api.getTranscript("dQw4w9WgXcQ", { format: "markdown" }));

Methods

Each method maps to one endpoint and costs what that endpoint costs (see Credits).

The iter_* / iter* methods follow next_cursor for you. Each page they fetch is one request and one credit, so stop iterating once you have what you need.

Errors

A non-2xx response raises (Python) or throws (TypeScript) a typed error that carries the status, the error code from the error envelope and, for 429s, retry_after / retryAfter.

All of them extend YTAPIError.

Retries

By default the clients retry a 429, a 5xx or a network error twice, backing off from 0.5 seconds up to 8 seconds and honoring Retry-After. They do not retry:

• A 429 that asks for a wait longer than 60 seconds, such as the free tier's daily limit, which resets at 00:00 UTC. The error is raised at once so your program doesn't hang. Change the cutoff with max_retry_wait (Python, seconds) or maxRetryWaitMs (TypeScript).
• Creating a batch after a 5xx or a network error, because the job may already exist.

Set max_retries=0 / maxRetries: 0 to turn retries off.

Other languages

For Go, Ruby, PHP or anything else, call the API over HTTPS as shown in the Quickstart. The OpenAPI spec lists the endpoints and schemas.