Entra.Chat Podcast MCP Server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for searching transcripts of Entra.Chat — Merill Fernando's Microsoft Entra podcast on YouTube. Ask your AI assistant about Entra ID features, community tools, and identity topics discussed on the show, and get answers with timestamped YouTube links that jump straight to the relevant moment.

Companion to entra-news-mcp (the written Entra.News newsletter archive) and microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp.

How it works

• Zero per-user infrastructure. Install via NPX; the transcript database (SQLite) is downloaded automatically from this repo's GitHub Releases on first run and cached locally (~/.entra-news-podcast-mcp/). Updates are checked weekly.
• Hybrid retrieval. BM25 keyword search (in-memory inverted index with Porter stemming — ideal for exact names like "PIM for Groups" or "Maester" in messy spoken-word transcripts) fused with OpenAI semantic vector search via Reciprocal Rank Fusion. No API key? Keyword search works out of the box.
• Timestamped deep links. Every search result links to youtube.com/watch?v=...&t=... so you can hear the discussion in context.
• Guest knowledge. Guests are extracted per episode with their profile links (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, GitHub, Bluesky) — ask "which episodes was X on?" or "who has been on the show?".
• Fresh weekly. A GitHub Action re-ingests the playlist every week and publishes an updated database release.

Installation

Requires Node.js 22+ (uses the built-in node:sqlite — no native dependencies).

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "entra-podcasts": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "entra-news-podcast-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

The OPENAI_API_KEY is optional — it enables semantic/hybrid search (embedding the query costs a fraction of a cent). Without it, BM25 keyword search is used.

Claude Code

claude mcp add entra-podcasts -- npx -y entra-news-podcast-mcp

VS Code (GitHub Copilot)

{
  "servers": {
    "entra-podcasts": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "entra-news-podcast-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "entra-podcasts": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "entra-news-podcast-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Example prompts

• "What did Merill and his guests say about PIM for Groups?"
• "Which episodes has Jane Doe been on? What's her LinkedIn?"
• "Find where Maester was discussed and give me the YouTube timestamp."
• "List the Entra.Chat episodes from March 2026."

Data & freshness

Development

npm install
npm run build

# Ingest (requires yt-dlp on PATH: pipx install yt-dlp / winget install yt-dlp)
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --limit 2        # test with 2 videos
node dist/scripts/ingest.js                  # full playlist backfill
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --incremental    # only new videos
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --video <id>     # one video (re-ingests)
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --reextract      # rebuild guests + tool mentions from stored
                                             # data (no network) — after editing
                                             # guest-overrides.json or known-tools.ts
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --embed-missing  # embed chunks that have no embedding yet
                                             # (needs OPENAI_API_KEY; no YouTube access)

# Run the server against a local DB
ENTRA_PODCAST_DB_PATH=./entra-news-podcasts.db npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/src/index.js

Set OPENAI_API_KEY during ingest to generate embeddings (semantic search); without it the ingest still completes and BM25 keyword search works.

Guest extraction overrides

Guests are extracted heuristically from video titles/descriptions. Episodes the heuristics miss are listed at the end of each ingest run — correct them in scripts/lib/guest-overrides.json (keyed by video_id, entries fully replace extraction for that video) and apply with node dist/scripts/ingest.js --reextract (no re-download needed).

PO token provider (yt-dlp caption downloads)

YouTube's caption/timedtext endpoint returning 429 has (at least) two distinct, unrelated causes — the ingest log's CAPTION_RATE_LIMITED error can't tell you which from the message text alone:

1. No PO (Proof-of-Origin) token supplied for the web/web_safari clients yt-dlp uses by default — see the yt-dlp PO Token Guide.
2. The video has multiple audio/dub tracks and resolved to the translated caption bucket rather than a native <lang>-orig transcript — see pickCaptionLanguage in scripts/lib/ytdlp.ts. Confirmed 2026-09-09: this still 429s even with a working PO token provider.

Regardless of source IP — confirmed 2026-09-09 by reproducing the identical failure from four different exit IPs (two IPRoyal residential identities in two countries, plus a clean home residential IP with no proxy at all). A proxy does not fix either cause.

CI sets up the PO token provider automatically (.github/workflows/weekly-update.yml, "Set up PO token provider" step, version-pinned — see that step's comment). For local ingest runs, set it up once:

# 1. Provider (script mode — spawns per request, no persistent server needed).
#    The server (git tag) and plugin (PyPI package, step 2) are separately
#    versioned and must match — check the pinned version in
#    .github/workflows/weekly-update.yml ($BGUTIL_VERSION) rather than
#    grabbing "latest" for one and not the other.
git clone --single-branch --branch 2.0.0 \
  https://github.com/Brainicism/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider.git \
  ~/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider   # %USERPROFILE%\bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider on Windows — this exact path, yt-dlp looks here by default
cd ~/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider/server
npm ci
npx tsc

# 2. Plugin — install into the SAME Python env yt-dlp itself runs under
#    (check with `python -c "import sys; print(sys.executable)"` vs `yt-dlp` on
#    PATH — a mismatch here is a common trap and yt-dlp will silently not see
#    the plugin). If yt-dlp was installed via pipx: `pipx inject yt-dlp bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider==2.0.0`
python3 -m pip install -U bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider==2.0.0

# Verify a WORKING provider — not just a listed one. yt-dlp lists an entry
# even when it's unusable, suffixed "(external, unavailable)"; a real one
# reads "(external)" with nothing else in the parens.
yt-dlp -v --skip-download --simulate "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw" 2>&1 \
  | grep -E "bgutil:script-(node|deno)-[0-9.]+ \(external\)"

Manual database refresh (if YouTube blocks CI)

YouTube sometimes blocks general page/API requests from datacenter IPs (BOT_BLOCKED in the workflow log — distinct from CAPTION_RATE_LIMITED above, which is captions-specific and not IP-related). Consumers are unaffected either way — the last-good release stays latest.

Mitigations built in before falling back to a manual refresh:

• CI installs Deno, which yt-dlp requires as a JS runtime to solve YouTube's player challenges — without it, requests are far more likely to be flagged as bot traffic.
• The YTDLP_PROXY repository secret (set since 2026-07-21 to a residential proxy URL in http://user:pass@host:port form — note IPRoyal's dashboard shows host:port:user:pass, which must be rewritten, and geo-targeting modifiers like _country-au_city-hurstville are appended to the password, not the username) routes all yt-dlp traffic through that proxy. The same env var works for local ingest runs. This only helps with BOT_BLOCKED, not CAPTION_RATE_LIMITED.

If CI is still blocked, refresh manually from a residential IP (set up the PO token provider above first):

node dist/scripts/ingest.js --incremental
gh release create "db-$(date -u +%Y.%m.%d)-9999" \
  --repo darrenjrobinson/EntraNewsPodcastMCPServer \
  --title "Database Update (manual)" --latest \
  ./entra-news-podcasts.db

Release process (maintainer)

Code releases (v* tags) publish to npm (Trusted Publishing / OIDC, no tokens) and the MCP Registry (io.github.darrenjrobinson/entra-news-podcast) via .github/workflows/publish-mcp.yml:

1. Bump version in package.json and both version fields in server.json (CI enforces lockstep).
2. Commit, then git tag v0.x.y && git push origin main v0.x.y.

Database releases (db-* tags) are produced by the weekly workflow and never trigger an npm publish.

License

MIT © Darren Robinson