YouTube Transcript & Search MCP Server

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

🎬 Why

Everyone who works with an agent has run this exchange at least once.

You:   Summarize this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
Agent: I'm not able to watch videos. If you paste the transcript here, I'll gladly help!

The transcript is precisely the thing the agent cannot get on its own. With this server connected, the same message simply resolves.

You:   Summarize this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
Agent: → get_transcript(video="kCc8FmEb1nY", video_metadata=true)      1 credit

       That's "Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out" by Andrej
       Karpathy, 1:56:20. He starts from an empty file and a bigram model,
       derives self-attention step by step, and ends with a working GPT that...

Reading one video is rarely where the job ends. Here is how the three ways of getting YouTube data into an agent actually compare.

⚡ 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.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "transcriptout": {
      "url": "https://api.transcriptout.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

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.

Summarize this talk and pull the three strongest quotes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

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.

🧰 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.

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):

{
  "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "language": "en",
  "kind": "manual",
  "transcript": [
    { "text": "Never gonna give you up", "start": 18.0, "duration": 4.12 },
    { "text": "Never gonna let you down", "start": 22.12, "duration": 3.85 }
  ]
}

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.

Credit hygiene: if you are going to fetch the transcript anyway, call get_transcript with video_metadata=true instead. It returns both for one credit where these are two calls and two.

3. search_youtube · 1 credit/page

Search YouTube for videos or channels. Paginate with next_page_token. has_more tells you whether another page exists.

4. list_channel_videos · 1 credit/page

List videos from a channel's Videos tab, newest first. Accepts an @handle, a channel name, a UC... channel ID or a channel URL.

ids_only=true is the cheap way to feed submit_transcripts_job.

5. search_channel_videos · 1 credit/page

Search inside one channel using YouTube's native relevance search. A result whose title lacks the query word is normal. Results are ranked by relevance, not by substring.

Read the full README on GitHub →