YouTube Transcript

This YouTube Transcript MCP acts as a bridge between AI models and video content, allowing users to pull text transcripts directly from any YouTube video. It simplifies the process of summarizing lectures, extracting key points from tutorials, or searching through video dialogue by providing a clean text version of the audio. Because it is a "remote" server, it works across all platforms—including mobile devices—without requiring users to install complex software or scripts on their own machines. Beyond simple extraction, the tool is designed to be highly versatile and robust. It automatically recognizes any YouTube link format, including standard URLs, shortened links, mobile addresses, and even YouTube Shorts or Live recordings. It also supports multi-language transcript retrieval, enabling users to specify a preferred language code for international content. To ensure speed and reliability, the server employs a smart caching system that saves previously requested transcripts for seven days, drastically reducing wait times for popular content. For developers and LLM integrators, this server is unique in offering a remote-first Model Context Protocol experience using Server-Sent Events (SSE) or HTTP transport. It is hosted on Cloudflare Workers, ensuring high availability and global low-latency performance through its edge network. Developers can easily integrate the `get_transcript` tool into their AI configurations, allowing an LLM to programmatically fetch data with built-in error handling and exponential backoff for rate limiting. This zero-maintenance architecture removes the friction of managing local dependencies, making it an ideal plug-and-play component for building sophisticated AI agents that need to process video information.

Category: Design, Media & Creative

Tags: cloudflare, summarization, transcription, video, youtube

Visit YouTube Transcript

How to install and configure YouTube Transcript

1. Installation The YouTube Transcript MCP server can be used either as a hosted service (no local installation required) or by deploying your own instance. Option 1: Hosted Server (Recommended) No installation is required. You can connect to the public server using npx directly in your configuration. Option 2: Self-Hosted Deployment If you wish to run your own instance on Cloudflare Workers, use the following commands: bash git clone https://github.com/ergut/youtube-transcript-mcp cd youtube-transcript-mcp npm install npm run deploy ---

2. Configuration To use this server with Claude Desktop, add the following to your claude_desktop_config.json file: Standard Configuration: json { "mcpServers": { "youtube-transcript": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "mcp-remote", "https://youtube-transcript-mcp.ergut.workers.dev/sse" ] } } } Advanced Configuration (with Debug Logging): json { "mcpServers": { "youtube-transcript": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "mcp-remote", "https://youtube-transcript-mcp.ergut.workers.dev/sse", "--debug" ] } } } Advanced Configuration (HTTP Transport Only): json { "mcpServers": { "youtube-transcript": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "mcp-remote", "https://youtube-transcript-mcp.ergut.workers.dev/mcp", "--transport", "http-only" ] } } } ---

3. Available Tools The server provides a single tool for transcript extraction: get_transcript * Description: Extracts the transcript from a YouTube video URL. * Parameters: * url (required): The YouTube video URL (supports all standard formats including shorts, live, and mobile). * language (optional): Language code for the transcript (e.g., 'en', 'tr', 'es'). Defaults to 'en'. ---

4. Example Prompts You can use the following prompts to interact with the tool in your MCP-enabled client: * "Extract the transcript from this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" * "Can you get the transcript of this video in Turkish: https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" * "Extract the Spanish transcript from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

What you can do with YouTube Transcript

Use Case 1: Rapid Video Content Summarization and Repurposing Problem: Content creators, marketers, and bloggers often spend hours re-watching their own or competitors' long-form videos to extract key points for social media posts, newsletters, or blog articles. Solution: This MCP allows Claude to instantly pull the full text of a video. Claude can then analyze the text to identify the most engaging moments, key takeaways, or quotes, and transform them into different formats without the user ever having to press "play." Example: A user provides a 30-minute podcast URL and asks: "Extract the transcript and write a 5-tweet thread summarizing the guest's three main predictions for the AI industry."

Use Case 2: Efficient Technical Learning and Documentation Problem: Developers often follow video tutorials to learn new frameworks, but it is difficult to search for specific code snippets or logic explanations within a video. Re-watching a 20-minute video just to find one command is inefficient. Solution: By fetching the transcript, a developer can use Claude as a "search engine" for the video's content. They can ask Claude to find specific steps, list mentioned dependencies, or explain a complex logic block described by the instructor. Example: A user provides a link to a React tutorial and asks: "Based on the transcript, what were the exact steps the instructor took to configure the Tailwind CSS file, and what libraries did they install via npm?"

Use Case 3: Multi-Language Research and Global Intelligence Problem: Researchers and journalists often find relevant information in YouTube videos published in foreign languages. Manually translating these or relying on YouTube's sometimes-clunky auto-translate UI can be cumbersome for deep analysis. Solution: The MCP’s language parameter allows users to specify which transcript version to pull. Once the transcript is in the chat context, Claude’s native translation and reasoning capabilities can be used to translate, summarize, and explain foreign-language content with high nuance. Example: A researcher finds a technical talk in Japanese regarding new battery technology. They use get_transcript(url="...", language="ja") and then tell Claude: "Translate this transcript into English and highlight any mentions of 'solid-state' energy density specs."

Use Case 4: Automated Study Guide and Quiz Generation Problem: Students watching educational videos or recorded lectures often struggle to take comprehensive notes while simultaneously trying to understand complex visual diagrams. Solution: The MCP can ingest the entire lecture's spoken content. Claude can then be instructed to act as a…

Key facts

  • Open Source
  • Design, Media & Creative, Web Search & Research
  • cloudflare, summarization, transcription, video, youtube

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