Youtube Transcript MCP Tutorial

This MCP server uses FastMCP and the public youtube-transcript-api package to fetch YouTube video captions and return the full transcript as either plain text or SRT subtitles.

It supports:

• Input: Full YouTube URL (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID or https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID)
• Output: Full transcript as a single plain-text string
• Behavior: Works only for videos with existing captions (manual or auto-generated)

1. Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• uv installed on your system

2. Install dependencies with uv

From the project root (/Users/jaswirraghoe/Documents/youtube_mcp):

cd /Users/jaswirraghoe/Documents/youtube_mcp
uv sync

This will install:

• fastmcp — MCP server framework
• youtube-transcript-api — public YouTube transcript API wrapper

3. Run the server

You can run the MCP server using uv:

cd /Users/jaswirraghoe/Documents/youtube_mcp
uv run youtube_mcp_server.py

This starts the MCP server defined in youtube_mcp_server.py.

4. Key Tools

YouTube Transcript	Description
get_transcript_text	Return the full transcript as plain text (captions concatenated in order)
get_transcript_srt	Return the full transcript in SRT subtitle format

If the video has no captions, captions are disabled, or the video is unavailable,
the tools return a clear error message.

5. Example MCP client configuration (Claude Desktop)

In your claude_desktop_config.json (or equivalent), you can register this server as:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-transcript": {
      "command": "/Users/jaswirraghoe/.local/bin/uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/Users/jaswirraghoe/Documents/youtube_mcp",
        "run",
        "youtube_mcp_server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

After saving the config, restart your MCP client. You should then see a youtube-transcript server with get_transcript_text and get_transcript_srt tools that accept YouTube URLs and return the transcript as plain text or SRT.