YouTube Subtitles MCP server

This MCP server allows you to fetch YouTube video subtitles and connect them to Claude.ai via the Model Context Protocol, making it possible to ask Claude to summarize YouTube videos by providing a URL directly in your prompts.

Installation

To use the YouTube MCP server, you need to have yt-dlp installed on your system:

Install yt-dlp

# macOS
brew install yt-dlp

# Windows
winget install yt-dlp

Install the MCP Server

Once you have yt-dlp installed, you can install and run the MCP server using npm:

npx -y @kazuph/mcp-youtube

Configuration

To use this MCP server with Claude, you need to configure it in your MCP configuration. Here's an example configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@kazuph/mcp-youtube"]
    }
  }
}

Usage

With the MCP server properly configured, you can ask Claude to summarize YouTube videos by including the video URL in your prompt.

Basic Usage

Simply ask Claude something like:

"Summarize the YouTube video <<URL>>"

Replace <<URL>> with the actual YouTube video URL you want Claude to summarize.

Parameters

When using the YouTube MCP server, you can specify the following parameters:

• url: YouTube video URL (required)
• language: Subtitle language code (optional, default: 'ja')

Language Options

The language parameter accepts ISO 639-1 language codes:

• ja: Japanese (default)
• en: English
• ko: Korean
• zh: Chinese
• fr: French
• And many more

Note: If subtitles are not available in your requested language, the server will return an error.

How to install this MCP server

For Claude Code

To add this MCP server to Claude Code, run this command in your terminal:

claude mcp add-json "youtube" '{"command":"npx","args":["-y","@kazuph/mcp-youtube"]}'

See the official Claude Code MCP documentation for more details.

For Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > Tools & Integrations and click "New MCP Server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "youtube": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "-y",
                "@kazuph/mcp-youtube"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explicitly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.

For Claude Desktop

To add this MCP server to Claude Desktop:

1. Find your configuration file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

2. Add this to your configuration file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "youtube": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "-y",
                "@kazuph/mcp-youtube"
            ]
        }
    }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop for the changes to take effect