Youtube Transcript MCP

🚀 YouTube Transcript MCP Server

A MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that fetches transcripts from YouTube videos. It enables AI models like Claude to easily utilize subtitle data from YouTube videos.

✨ Features

• Extract transcripts from YouTube video URLs.
• Support multi - language transcripts (e.g., Korean, English).
• Support both automatically generated and manually created subtitles.
• Query the list of available transcripts.

📦 Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd youtube_transcript_mcp
   

2. Create and activate a virtual environment

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # Linux/Mac
   # Or for Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
   

3. Install dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

💻 Configuration in Claude Desktop

To use this MCP server in Claude Desktop, you need to modify the Claude configuration file.

macOS

Location of the Claude Desktop configuration file: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Windows

Location of the Claude Desktop configuration file: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Add the following content to the configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-transcript": {
      "command": "/path/to/your/youtube_transcript_mcp/venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["/path/to/your/youtube_transcript_mcp/youtube_transcript_mcp_server.py"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

⚠️ Important Note

Replace /path/to/your/youtube_transcript_mcp with the actual project path.

💻 Usage Examples

Basic Usage

Once the configuration in Claude Desktop is complete, you can use it as follows:

Fetch a transcript

Get the transcript of this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

Fetch a transcript in a specific language

Get the English transcript of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

Query the list of available transcripts

Show the list of available transcripts for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

📚 Supported URL Formats

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• VIDEO_ID (only 11 - digit video IDs)

📚 Supported Languages

• Korean (ko) - Default
• English (en)
• All other languages supported by YouTube

The server will automatically try Korean → English → automatically generated subtitles if the requested language is not available.

📚 API Documentation

This MCP server provides the following two tools:

1. get_youtube_transcript

• Description: Fetch the transcript of a YouTube video.
• Parameters:
  • url (Required): YouTube video URL.
  • language (Optional, default: "ko"): Language code.

2. list_available_transcripts

• Description: Fetch the list of available transcripts.
• Parameters:
  • url (Required): YouTube video URL.

🛠️ Troubleshooting

If the configuration is not applied

1. Completely close and restart Claude Desktop.
2. Check if the path of the configuration file is correct.
3. Check if the virtual environment is activated.

If the transcript cannot be found

• The video may not have subtitles.
• The video may be private or access - restricted.
• Use the list_available_transcripts tool to check the available languages.

📚 Dependencies

• mcp>=0.8.0: Model Context Protocol library.
• youtube-transcript-api>=0.6.0: YouTube transcript API.
• asyncio: Asynchronous processing.

📄 License

This project is distributed under the MIT license.