Instagram Transcription, TikTok Transcription & YouTube Transcription in n8n — New Community Node for Video-to-Text

Built with n8n
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Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Hey everyone! :waving_hand:

I built a community node that connects n8n to ReelScribe for automatic video transcription. Wanted to share it in case it’s useful for your workflows.

What it does

The ReelScribe node lets you transcribe videos from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — just give it a URL and it handles the rest.

Key features:

  • Built-in polling — the node automatically waits until transcription is done (no need for complicated Wait node loops)
  • Fire-and-forget mode — submit a video and get a webhook callback when it’s ready
  • Batch processing — transcribe a whole list of URLs from a spreadsheet
  • Credit monitoring — check your balance right inside n8n

Install

Search “reelscribe” in Community Nodes, or:

npm install n8n-nodes-reelscribe

Example workflows

1. Transcribe videos → Save to Google Sheets

Google Sheets (Read URLs) → ReelScribe (Transcribe) → Google Sheets (Write Results)

Grab a list of video URLs, transcribe each one, write the text back to your sheet.

2. Video → Transcription → AI Summary

ReelScribe (Transcribe) → OpenAI (Summarize) → Notion (Save)

Transcribe a video, have GPT summarize it, then save the summary to Notion.

3. Auto-transcribe new content

RSS Trigger → ReelScribe (Transcribe) → Slack (Notify)

When a new video is detected, auto-transcribe it and notify your team on Slack.

4. Competitor analysis

Google Sheets (Competitor URLs) → ReelScribe (Transcribe) → OpenAI (Analyze) → Email

Batch transcribe competitor videos, analyze their messaging with AI, get a report via email.

Links

Would love to hear what workflows you’d build with this! Happy to answer any questions. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks Benjamin! UX and ease of use are exactly what we’re going for :folded_hands:

What’s handled:

  • Up to 5 consecutive polling errors are silently retried (covers transient hiccups)
  • Configurable timeout (default 5 min) so it won’t hang indefinitely
  • Supports “Continue On Fail” — errors surface as output instead of crashing your workflow
  • All errors wrapped in NodeApiError for clean UI display

Not yet handled:

  • No 429 / Retry-After detection
  • No exponential backoff outside the polling loop
  • No differentiated handling for 5xx errors

For now, n8n’s built-in Retry On Fail covers most transient failures at the workflow level — keeping things simple was intentional, since our focus is on UX and ease of use over configuration overhead.

Rate-limit-aware retries are on the roadmap though — good nudge to prioritize it! :folded_hands:

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Quick update — we just shipped v0.3.0 with the error handling improvements we discussed:

What’s new:

  • Automatic retries with exponential backoff — retryable errors (429, 5xx, network timeouts) are retried up to 3 times
    with increasing delays + jitter
  • Rate limit detection — honors Retry-After headers on 429 responses
  • Actionable error messages — clear, specific messages per error type (auth failures, rate limits, downtime) instead of
    generic errors
  • Fully configurable — Max Retries, Initial Delay, and Retry-After settings are all tunable under a new “Error Handling”
    section, but the defaults just work out of the box

Thanks for the nudge @Benjamin_Behrens — community feedback driving the roadmap is what it’s all about!

Update with: npm install n8n-nodes-reelscribe@latest

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Great work on this, SIAN! Adding exponential backoff and handling 429s directly in the node is a huge time-saver. So many custom nodes fail silently when rate limits hit, which causes an absolute nightmare for debugging workflows later. Love seeing builders prioritize reliability right out of the gate. Upvoted!

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Really appreciate it — and you nailed exactly why we added it. Silent failures on rate limits are one of those things that seem fine until you’re debugging a workflow at midnight wondering why half your data is missing :sweat_smile:

Thanks for the upvote! :folded_hands:

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