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Show HN: YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube (github.com)
5 points by umbertotancorre 37 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.

1 comments

Really interesting! Using agents with YouTube will be incredible. Have you thought about using an accessible CLI in addition to MCP?
Yes, I'm already building the CLI and planning to making it public in a couple of days. I think it will consume fewer tokens than the MCP. Currently building in public on X (https://x.com/umbertotancorre)