youtube-transcripts

What it does

Gives any MCP-compatible agent (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT, Codex) clean YouTube transcripts as timestamped markdown, ready to use as context. No scraping, no proxies, no YouTube rate limits to manage: the server handles the fetch and caches every result.

Tools

All tools are read-only. Videos without captions fail free. Rate limit: 5 requests per 10 seconds.

Setup

Get a free API key (25 free credits, no card) at youtubetranscriptdownload.com/account, then add the server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ytd": {
      "url": "https://youtubetranscriptdownload.com/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ytd_sk_YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ytd_sk_YOUR_KEY" \
  ytd https://youtubetranscriptdownload.com/api/mcp

Example output

get_transcript returns the video title, source link, timestamped text, and a credit footer:

How Transformers Work

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=...

[00:00:12] The transformer architecture was introduced in the 2017 paper
Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al.
...

---
1 credit used · 42 remaining

get_channel_transcripts and get_playlist_transcripts return one section per video, separated by dividers; videos without captions are noted and cost nothing:

Lex Fridman Podcast · 3 videos

[transcript of video 1]

---

[transcript of video 2]

---

abc123xyz: No transcript available (skipped, not charged)

---
2 credits used · 40 remaining

polish_transcript turns raw auto-captions into clean text, faithful to what was said:

Before: so um the transformer architecture was introduced uh in the
attention is all you need paper in in 2017

After:  The transformer architecture was introduced in the Attention
Is All You Need paper in 2017.

Links

• Setup guide for all clients: https://youtubetranscriptdownload.com/mcp
• REST API docs (same backend): https://youtubetranscriptdownload.com/youtube-transcript-api
• Pricing: https://youtubetranscriptdownload.com/pricing