YouTube Transcripts, Search & Summaries MCP server

YouTube Transcripts MCP Server

Hosted version (no setup): apify.com/parallelstudio/youtube-transcripts-mcp. Connect any MCP client to https://parallelstudio--youtube-transcripts-mcp.apify.actor/mcp with your Apify token, pay per call. This repo is the open-source code; you can also run it locally with npm install && npm run build && node dist/index.js (stdio).

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.gunnargray-dev/youtube-transcripts-mcp -->

Give your AI agent YouTube transcripts, search, chapters and summaries. This MCP server fetches the captions of any public YouTube video (as plain text, timestamped segments or SRT) together with its metadata. It also searches YouTube, returns chapters, and builds structured extractive summaries where every point links to the moment it comes from.

It works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf and any other client that supports MCP over Streamable HTTP. You don't need a YouTube API key or a Google account. No LLM runs on the server, so you don't pay for anyone else's tokens.

What you can do with it

• Research faster. "Summarize this 2-hour podcast and give me the 10 key points with timestamps."
• Answer questions about a video. Load the transcript and let your agent quote and cite exact moments.
• Navigate long videos. Get the creator's chapters. If the video has none, get topic segments derived from the transcript.
• Find sources. Search YouTube with filters for upload date, length, sort order and "has subtitles", then pull transcripts for the best hits.
• Repurpose content. Export SRT subtitles, build show notes, or draft a blog post from a talk, using any caption language or YouTube's machine translation.

Tools

video accepts an 11-character id (dQw4w9WgXcQ) or any YouTube URL: watch?v=, youtu.be/, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/, m. and music. hosts, and youtube-nocookie.com.

All tools are read-only.

Error codes

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.