The constraints are the useful part of the documentation: public videos only, captions must exist, and auto-generated ones may be imperfect. That means the two failure modes you will hit — no video ID resolved, or no transcript available — are named along with what to check. It is a single-purpose tool with no configuration, which is exactly right when the job is getting text out of a video.
A TypeScript MCP server that pulls transcripts out of YouTube videos, built for Cursor and Claude Desktop. One input — the video URL — and the text comes back.
- Transcript extraction from any public YouTube video, taking the video URL as input
- A stdio server that registers as a plain command entry in Cursor or Claude Desktop
No account and no key. Node.js v16 or higher and pnpm or npm: clone, install, run the build, then point your client at the absolute path of `build/index.js` with `node`. Two limits worth knowing before you rely on it: only public videos work, and the video must have captions or subtitles enabled — auto-generated captions come through but are not always accurate.
One command — npx -y send-email