YouTube MCP, give any AI agent access to YouTube
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
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 audioNo YouTube API key. No account. No signup. Everything runs locally on your machine against publicly available data.Setup is one line: npx @umbertotancorre/youtube-mcpyt-dlp and ffmpeg are bundled automatically during install, so there's nothing to configure manually.It's free and MIT licensed. Feedbacks are welcome.
HN · launched May 19, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: model context protocol tools · 465 launches, 15 in the last 7 days ▼ -25% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 465 launches in model context protocol tools →
Could you build this?
Yes An MCP server wrapping YouTube is a straightforward Node/Python service wrapping youtube-transcript-api or the official YouTube Data API.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: CLI interface for YouTube tool
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 497 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #481 of 498 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 193 days after the earliest competitor.
- mcp · github · 2026-10-12 · 33 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- YouTube & TikTok Transcripts MCP · ph · 2026-10-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Clip Studio MCP · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- youtube-transcript-hermes-plugin · github · 2026-11-07 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Clipto MCP · ph · 2026-08-19 · 646 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I gave my video editor an MCP server so Claude can edit videos for me · hn · 2026-08-04 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- MCP Server by XWiki · ph · 2026-10-30 · 175 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- CapMonster Cloud MCP · ph · 2026-10-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.