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Show HN: YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube
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.
- vforno 5mo agoReally interesting! Using agents with YouTube will be incredible. Have you thought about using an accessible CLI in addition to MCP?
- umbertotancorre 5mo agoYes, 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 https://x.com/umbertotancorre)
- oneshotforge 5mo ago[dead]
- umbertotancorre 5mo agoCLI available: https://github.com/umbertotancorre/youtube-mcp-cli https://github.com/umbertotancorre/youtube-mcp-cli