YouTube Transcript MCP pulls the captions of a YouTube video into your agent's context. Give it a link, a Shorts URL or a video ID and it returns the text, with the video's title, channel, views and publish date. It's a community server, not a Google product, with an MIT license. No key and no account.
Use it two ways. In Claude Code or Claude Desktop, it turns a webinar, a competitor's demo or a podcast episode into a brief, a list of quotes or a draft post in a minute. In your own product, it can power "summarize this video" or a notes app built on videos. There is no hosted URL: it runs as a local process, so for a product you host it yourself and expose it to your agent.
Watch out
- It reads captions through YouTube's unofficial internal endpoints, not an official API. YouTube changes them, and the server breaks until someone ships a fix. Pin a version you've tested.
- YouTube blocks most cloud provider IPs (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) from fetching transcripts. It works from a laptop and may fail in production. Plan for a residential proxy or a paid service.
- Videos without captions return nothing, and auto-generated captions get names and numbers wrong. Check quotes against the video before you publish them.
Install
In Claude Code:
Terminal
Loading editor...
claude mcp add youtube-transcript -- npx -y @kimtaeyoon83/mcp-server-youtube-transcript
The npm package is still version 0.1.1 from November 2024. It only takes a URL and a language. Timestamps, ad filtering, video metadata and
analyze_video live in the GitHub repo, so for those clone it, run npm install and npm run build, and add node /path/to/dist/index.js instead. analyze_video needs a TWELVELABS_API_KEY and a direct video file URL, not a YouTube page.In your product, there is no URL to attach. The server talks over stdio, so run it next to your agent, or wrap it in an HTTP bridge on your own server and attach that URL to your API call. Read the cloud IP note below before you deploy.
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