artemchuikin/youtube-mcp

Let your AI agent read YouTube.
Transcripts in five formats, native video and channel search, channel and playlist listings,
and background jobs that deliver up to 4,000 transcripts at a time. 14 tools behind one hosted
endpoint. Nothing runs on your machine.
Why ·
Quick start ·
Tools ·
Install ·
Recipes ·
Pricing ·
Errors
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🎬 Why
Everyone who works with an agent has run this exchange at least once.
The transcript is precisely the thing the agent cannot get on its own. With this server
connected, the same message simply resolves.
Reading one video is rarely where the job ends. Here is how the three ways of getting YouTube
data into an agent actually compare.
| | This server | Local yt-dlp / scraper MCP | Google YouTube Data API |
| ------------------------ | ----------- | -------------------------- | ----------------------- |
| Transcripts | ✅ any public video, 5 formats | ⚠️ blocked on datacenter IPs, breaks when YouTube changes markup | ❌ not served at all |
| Setup | ✅ a URL and an API key | ❌ local install, binaries to keep alive | ❌ Cloud project, OAuth consent screens |
| YouTube search | ✅ native, 1 credit per page | ❌ | ⚠️ 100 quota units per search |
| Channels & playlists | ✅ 100 videos/page, or 500 bare IDs | ❌ one video at a time | ⚠️ quota-metered per item |
| Bulk transcripts | ✅ 4,000 per background job | ❌ | ❌ |
| RAG-ready chunking | ✅ 20-5,000 chars, word-level timestamps | ❌ | ❌ |
| When YouTube changes | ✅ fixed server-side, nothing to update | ❌ you patch and redeploy | ✅ |
| Failed calls | ✅ credits refund themselves | ❌ your retry logic | ⚠️ quota spent anyway |
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⚡ Quick start
**1. Get an API key.** Sign up at transcriptout.com and create a key
in the dashboard. New accounts receive 100 free credits and
no card is asked. Keys start with sk_ and are shown once.
**2. Point your client at the server.** It speaks streamable HTTP and authenticates with one
Bearer header.
One-click buttons for Cursor and VS Code sit at the top of this page. Exact snippets for the rest
live under Install in your client.
**3. Paste a link.**
The agent picks get_transcript on its own, reads the timed text and answers from it. Every
response carries an X-Credits-Remaining header, so the budget stays in view the whole session.
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🧰 The 14 tools
All 14 tools are exposed automatically once you connect. **Most calls cost 1 credit.** Credits
are refunded automatically when a call fails before reaching YouTube (validation errors, rate
limits, our own capacity), so you pay for answers, not for failures. A definitive "this video has no
captions" is an answer and is billed like one.
1. get_transcript · 1 credit
Fetch the transcript of any YouTube video. format=text (default) returns plain readable text,
cheapest for a model to reason over, and format=json returns timed segments.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
| ---------------- | ------- | ------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| video | string | **required** | YouTube URL (full or short) or 11-char video ID |
| lang | string | "en" | Language code of the track (en, de, ...) |
| format | string | "text" | "text" (plain text), "json" (segments with start/duration in seconds), "srt"/"vtt" (subtitle file body), "srv3" (raw YouTube XML) |
| kind | string | auto-detect | "manual" or "auto". Left out, a manual track wins and auto is the fallback |
| segment | integer | see below | Max characters per segment. 500-1500 makes RAG-ready chunks |
| video_metadata | boolean | false | Add title, channel, duration and views in the SAME call, same 1 credit |
Left out, segment cuts auto-generated tracks into ~180-character segments and returns manual
tracks exactly as their author broke them. Pass it whenever you need one size regardless of which
track answers.
**Example output (format=json):**
> srt and vtt come back as complete subtitle file bodies, ready to be written to disk by the
> agent. srv3 is the raw source XML and does not combine with segment.
2. get_video_info · 1 credit
Metadata for one video (title, channel, duration, views, thumbnails) plus the list of available
transcript languages, WITHOUT downloading the subtitles.
| Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
| --------- | ------ | ------------ | -------------------------- |
| id | string | **required** | YouTube video ID or URL |