Uoink

License: MIT Release Platform: Windows MCP server Website: uoink.app

Uoink keeps the videos, podcasts, and articles creators and AI developers study on their own disk, then hands them to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or a local MCP agent as a cited corpus.

Free, open source (MIT), and local-first: no account, no Uoink cloud, no required telemetry. One click saves a source — full transcript, timestamped screenshots, comments, and metadata — as a structured Markdown corpus on your machine, then makes it available to your AI three ways: the clipboard, a local MCP server, and an OpenAPI bridge.

• Website: https://uoink.app · Install: https://uoink.app/install · Developers: https://uoink.app/developers
• Status: Windows 10/11 today; Mac build queued after Windows stabilizes. Chrome Web Store listing pending — for now the extension sideloads from the release.

Why Uoink

You see a video that's clearly working and you want to know why. So you paste the YouTube link into Claude and hope it can "watch" it. It can't — it hallucinates the quotes, invents the title, and gives up past the first paragraph. You end up watching the whole thing on 2x, taking notes by hand.

Uoink fixes that. Click the Uoink button under any video (or right-click a link, or press Alt+U) and you get the full transcript, timestamped screenshots, top comments, channel context, and metadata — copied to your clipboard and saved on disk, ready for Claude, ChatGPT, or your notes app. Or tell your AI agent "uoink that video and decode the hook" and it does both, with no clipboard step.

The corpus compounds. Every source you save lands in one local library your AI can search, cite, and write from — in your voice.

What you can capture

Source	Captured
YouTube (flagship)	Timestamped transcript, screenshots, top comments, channel context, full metadata, JSON sidecar
X / Twitter video + text	Video transcript and post text, author credit, thread context
Podcasts	RSS feeds and episodes, local Whisper transcription, speaker diarization
Web pages / articles	Readable text extraction into the same corpus format
Reddit	Thread + top comments as Markdown

Everything files into one local library, auto-sorted into topic folders under your Uoink output folder (default Desktop\Uoink\).

Three ways your AI reads the corpus

1. Clipboard (the creator path) — Click Uoink, paste into Claude / ChatGPT. Transcript plus a paste-safe subset of screenshots inlined as images so the model sees text and frames in one paste.

2. MCP server (the agent path) — A local Model Context Protocol server exposing 14 tools over stdio (the curated everyday set), tested with Claude Desktop and Cursor. Cline and Continue are standard-stdio compatibility paths, not individually smoke-tested. Two surfaces, on purpose:

• stdio exposes the curated everyday set most agents need (uoink_video, uoink_playlist, list_recent_uoinks, search_uoinks, get_uoink_corpus, analyze_comments, classify_hook, get_citation_map, get_uoink_health, find_mentions, and more).
• HTTP JSON-RPC at /mcp/v1 exposes the full local tool registry (Writing Studio, workspaces, podcasts, monitored playlists, taste/engagement memory, source capture) — the same handlers, same auth token.

3. OpenAPI bridge (for local agents that don't speak MCP) — Local OpenAPI-capable agents and scripts can drive the same tools over an OpenAPI 3.1 surface at /openapi/v1/spec.json + POST /tools/<name>.

MCP setup (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline)

After installing Uoink, open the setup page from the extension popup's Settings link and copy the generated snippet — or paste this into your client's MCP config. The stdio server runs the bundled Python against the installed uoink_mcp.py (the C-01 fix pins the app dir onto sys.path, so this command works on every install):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uoink": {
      "command": "%LOCALAPPDATA%\\Uoink\\python\\python.exe",
      "args": ["%LOCALAPPDATA%\\Uoink\\uoink_mcp.py"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop does not expand %LOCALAPPDATA% — use the full absolute path (e.g. C:\\Users\\<you>\\AppData\\Local\\Uoink\\python\\python.exe). Restart the client after saving; Uoink's tools appear automatically.

One-click install: a Claude Desktop .mcpb bundle installs the stdio server without hand-editing config. See docs/mcpb-bundle.md.

HTTP transport: point an HTTP MCP client at http://127.0.0.1:5179/mcp/v1 and send the header X-Uoink-Token (read the token from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uoink\token.txt).

Uoink Operator Skill

Uoink ships a portable Skill at skills/uoink/SKILL.md (installed to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uoink\skills\uoink\) that gives MCP-capable agents the operating frame for Uoink corpora: timestamp-citation discipline, decode-don't-dunk analysis, and the Uoink Hook Type taxonomy. Clients that support Agent Skills can load the same file alongside Uoink's MCP tools.

Install

1. Download the installer. Download Uoink-Setup-3.7.0.exe from the published v3.7.0 release. Windows 10/11 is available now; the Mac .dmg is queued after Windows stabilizes.
2. Run it. Defaults install to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uoink\ (no admin required). The finish page can launch the helper immediately, and an autostart entry runs it on each login.
3. Load the bundled extension. On first launch, Uoink shows a one-time setup splash. Use it to open your browser's extensions page and copy the installed extension path; then enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and select that folder. (The Chrome Web Store listing is pending; sideload is the current path.)

For developers running from source, see REQUIREMENTS.md. Build the installer locally with ./build.ps1 (see docs/build-installer.md).

How it works

Extension flow: click Uoink under a video → Uoink extracts transcript, screenshots, comments, metadata → Markdown corpus lands on your clipboard (screenshots embedded) and the full set saves to disk → paste, run a prompt, get analysis.

Agent flow (MCP): your agent has the Uoink tools after setup → ask "uoink this video and decode the hook" → the agent calls uoink_video → classify_hook → analysis, no clipboard step.

Optional AI features and privacy

Core capture works with no API key. Comment Intelligence, Hook Type classification, Entity Extraction, and the agent-callable analyze_comments / classify_hook tools call the Anthropic API and are off by default. When you enable them you supply your own Anthropic API key on the setup page; it's stored in the OS credential store (encrypted at rest) and used only for those calls. Uoink itself collects nothing — the core extraction stays local except the source fetch. Revoke the key any time via the setup page.

Disclaimer & Terms of Use

Uoink is designed and built for personal research, study, and original creator drafting. Users are solely responsible for ensuring that their use of captured media (transcript text, screenshots, and comments) complies with the Terms of Service, copyright policies, and API guidelines of YouTube, Reddit, X (Twitter), and any other source platforms. Uoink does not host, share, or claim ownership over third-party media.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Changelog & roadmap

See CHANGELOG.md for version history and ROADMAP.md for what's next.

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Uoink is part of the ReplayRyan family of tools.