YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube

Name: YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube
Availability: InStock
Author: umbertotancorre

by umbertotancorre·May 19, 2026·5 points·3 comments

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AI Analysis

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Bundles yt-dlp and ffmpeg automatically so agents can finally triage watch-later lists.

Strengths

•Zero API key requirement by leveraging local yt-dlp and ffmpeg binaries.
•Search within captions tool enables agents to find specific video moments.
•One-line npx installation handles all dependency management automatically.

Weaknesses

•Limited to MCP-compatible clients, excluding many popular AI chat interfaces.
•No support for private videos or authenticated YouTube features.

Post Description

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.