YouTube Transcript MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that fetches and cleans transcripts from YouTube videos using yt-dlp.

Features

• Robust Transcript Fetching: Uses yt-dlp to retrieve subtitles.

  • Attempts to fetch manual subtitles first (high quality).

  • Falls back to auto-generated subtitles if manual ones are unavailable.

• Smart Cleaning:

  • Removes VTT formatting, tags, and timestamps.

  • Deduplicates repeated lines common in auto-generated captions.

  • Cleans up common YouTube auto-caption artifacts.

• MCP Integration: Fully compatible with Claude Desktop and other MCP clients.

Related MCP server: YouTube Subtitle MCP Server

Tools

get_youtube_transcript

Fetches and cleans the transcript for a given YouTube video URL.

• Arguments: url (string) - The full URL of the YouTube video.

• Returns: A clean string containing the video transcript.

Installation

This project uses uv for dependency management.

Prerequisites

• uv installed.

• A recent version of Python.

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/warshanks/yt-transcript-mcp.git
   cd yt-transcript-mcp

2. Install dependencies:

   uv sync

Configuration

Claude Desktop

To use this server with Claude Desktop, add the following to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "yt-transcript": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/absolute/path/to/yt-transcript-mcp",
        "run",
        "server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Replace /absolute/path/to/yt-transcript-mcp with the actual path to your cloned repository.

Development

To run the server locally for testing or development:

uv run server.py

License

MIT