Show HN: YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube

5 points

18 days ago

I have a long YouTube watch-later playlist and wanted Claude to help me triage it by summarizing each video. It couldn't. I later discovered YouTube is not accessible to Claude, ChatGPT and majority of AIs. So I built this MCP server to fix that.

This is a local MCP server that gives any MCP-compatible client (Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw and others) 8 tools for working with YouTube content:

- fetch full transcript, with or without timestamps - download transcript as a .md file - get video metadata (title, channel, views, duration, likes, description) - search within captions for a keyword or phrase - download video or audio

No YouTube API key. No account. No signup. Everything runs locally on your machine against publicly available data.

Setup is one line: npx @umbertotancorre/youtube-mcp

yt-dlp and ffmpeg are bundled automatically during install, so there's nothing to configure manually.

It's free and MIT licensed. Feedbacks are welcome.

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