Set up YouTube MCP server for AI agent access

Enable Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP-compatible agents to summarize and search YouTube videos locally

Updated: 5/20/2026
Difficulty
easy
Time
5m
Use Case
Triage and summarize YouTube playlists, extract transcripts, search video captions, download video metadata without API keys
Popularity
0 views

About this automation

Install and run a local MCP server that grants any MCP-compatible AI agent 8 tools for YouTube content: fetch transcripts with timestamps, download transcripts as markdown, retrieve video metadata, search captions, and download video/audio. No authentication or API keys required.

How to implement

1

Run: npx @umbertotancorre/youtube-mcp

2

yt-dlp and ffmpeg bundle automatically during install

3

Connect your MCP-compatible client (Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw) to the local server

4

Use agent tools to fetch transcripts, metadata, search captions, or download content