YouTube Transcript MCP Server: Setup Guide for Claude and Other AI Tools

The Model Context Protocol standardizes how an AI client discovers and calls external tools. Under the hood it's JSON-RPC 2.0 - the client asks the server what tools exist and their input schemas, then invokes them by name with structured arguments and gets a structured result back, all inside the same conversation turn.

MCP servers run over one of two transports: stdio, where the client launches the server as a local subprocess (typical for tools that need local filesystem access), or Streamable HTTP, where the server is remote and reachable over HTTPS by any number of clients at once - which is what this server uses. (An older HTTP+SSE transport exists in some documentation but is deprecated in favor of Streamable HTTP.) Practically, this means you never run anything locally to use this server - just point your client at the URL.

The paginated tools (search, list-channel, list-playlist) all accept a continuation token from a previous response to fetch the next page, rather than an offset/limit pair.

Sign up from the dashboard and create an API key - 100 credits are included free, no card required. This key is the bearer token the MCP server authenticates with for most clients.

Add this to your MCP client's config (e.g. claude_desktop_config.json, or via claude mcp add for Claude Code):

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

Replace sk_live_... with your own API key. Restart the client fully and the 6 tools above appear automatically - most clients only read this config on startup, not on a hot reload.

Any client that supports a remote MCP server over Streamable HTTP with custom headers uses the same shape of config - just the surrounding file and field names differ (e.g. Cursor's .cursor/mcp.json, Windsurf's MCP settings panel). If a client only supports OAuth-based servers rather than a static bearer header, use the OAuth flow described next instead.

For clients that authenticate MCP servers via OAuth rather than a pasted API key (for example, ChatGPT's custom connectors), this server also supports OAuth 2.1 with Dynamic Client Registration - point the client at the same server URL and it discovers the OAuth metadata and walks you through an authorization flow instead of asking for a bearer token directly.

Once connected, natural prompts are enough - the model decides which tool to call:

• "Get the transcript for youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and summarize it in 3 bullets."
• "Search YouTube for 'Next.js server actions' and list the top 5 results."
• "List every video @mkbhd has uploaded and find ones mentioning 'battery'."