Transcriptapi Plugin

YouTube MCP + YouTube Skill for AI Agents

The complete YouTube toolkit as a single Agent Plugin, by TranscriptAPI.
YouTube transcripts, captions and subtitles, video & channel search, channel browsing, playlist extraction and new-upload polling — 6 hosted MCP tools plus one comprehensive skill.
One install. OAuth sign-in. No API key to manage. Free tier, no card.

Powering 15M+ transcripts every month · 500K+ transcripts processed daily · 49ms median response time Trusted in production by youtubetotranscript.com (~11M/mo) and recapio.com (~2.8M/mo).

🧩 What is this?

This repository root is a conformant Agent Plugins 1.0.0 package — the open, vendor-neutral packaging standard published 2026-08-06 by Amazon, Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel, with Google as a core maintainer. It bundles MCP servers and Agent Skills into one portable, drop-in folder that every compliant client can read.

One install gives your agent both halves:

Just ask, in plain English:

Summarize this video for me: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Find Andrew Huberman's three most-viewed videos about sleep and compare them.
What has @TED posted in the last month?

That last set of prompts touches 3 of the 6 tools — search_youtube, search_channel_videos, get_youtube_transcript — without you writing a line of code.

Why TranscriptAPI

Most YouTube integrations do one thing — pull a single transcript. This is a full toolkit.

⚡ Install

As an Agent Plugin _{· recommended}

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 standardizes the package format, not installation — so each client owns its own install flow. Point any of them at this repository:

https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin

"chat.pluginLocations": { "/absolute/path/to/transcriptapi-plugin": true }

git clone https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin ~/.cursor/plugins/local/transcriptapi

/plugin marketplace add ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin
/plugin install transcriptapi@transcriptapi

The first YouTube question you ask opens a TranscriptAPI OAuth sign-in (free account, 100 credits, no card). Done.

Skills only (no MCP)

The skill also works standalone against the REST API with an API key:

npx skills add ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin

npx clawhub@latest install youtube-full

hermes skills install skills-sh/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin/skills/youtube

git clone https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin.git
cp -r transcriptapi-plugin/skills/youtube ~/.claude/skills/

Not a developer? Paste this into Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw or any agent:

Install the TranscriptAPI plugin from https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-plugin
I want YouTube transcripts, search and channel browsing from my agent. Set it up for me.

Tip — auto-invoke. Add this rule to your client so you never have to ask explicitly:

When I share a YouTube URL, automatically use TranscriptAPI to fetch the transcript
before responding. This applies to any video analysis, summarization, or question
about YouTube content.

claude mcp add --transport http transcript-api https://transcriptapi.com/mcp

amp mcp add transcript-api https://transcriptapi.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "transcript-api": {
      "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

"mcp.servers": {
  "transcript-api": {
    "type": "http",
    "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
    "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
  }
}

{ "mcpServers": { "transcript-api": {
  "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp", "type": "streamableHttp",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } } } }

{ "mcpServers": { "transcript-api": {
  "serverUrl": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } } } }

{ "context_servers": { "transcript-api": {
  "source": "remote", "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } } } }

{ "mcpServers": { "transcript-api": {
  "httpUrl": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } } } }

"augment.advanced": { "mcpServers": [
  { "name": "transcript-api", "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
    "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } } ] }

{ "url": "https://transcriptapi.com/mcp",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" } }

🛠️ The 6 MCP tools

All six are exposed automatically once you connect. 1 credit = 1 successful (HTTP 200) request. Failed and rate-limited calls do not consume credits.

1. get_youtube_transcript

Fetch the transcript for any YouTube video — as markdown (with metadata) or structured JSON.

Cost: 1 credit.

# Metadata

## Title: Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
## Author: RickAstleyVEVO

# Transcript

[0.0s] Never gonna give you up
[4.12s] Never gonna let you down

{
  "transcript": [
    { "text": "Never gonna give you up", "start": 0.0, "duration": 4.12 },
    { "text": "Never gonna let you down", "start": 4.12, "duration": 3.85 }
  ],
  "metadata": { "title": "Rick Astley...", "author_name": "RickAstleyVEVO" }
}

2. search_youtube

Search YouTube for videos or channels. Filter by type and paginate with a continuation token.

Cost: 1 credit per page (~20 results).

3. get_channel_latest_videos _{· FREE}

The ~15 most recent uploads from any channel via RSS — no credits. Perfect for monitoring, daily recaps, or triggering downstream pipelines.

Cost: Free.

4. search_channel_videos

Search inside one specific channel for videos matching a query.

Cost: 1 credit per page (~30 results).

5. list_channel_videos

List every video on a channel, ~100 per page. Ideal for building databases or bulk transcript extraction.

Cost: 1 credit per page (~100 results).

6. list_playlist_videos

Every video in a YouTube playlist (PL/UU/LL/FL/OL IDs supported). Process entire courses or lecture series in a single call.

Cost: 1 credit per page (~100 results).

🎯 The youtube skill

One skill covers everything. It teaches the agent when YouTube is the right source, which tool answers each kind of question, and how not to burn credits — the judgement the MCP tool definitions can't carry on their own.

It handles both data paths automatically:

• MCP available → drives the 6 hosted tools above. OAuth, no key.
• MCP not available → falls back to the REST API with a TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY, so the skill still works in clients that load skills but not MCP servers.

Structured for progressive disclosure, so the agent pays for detail only when it needs it:

skills/youtube/
├── SKILL.md                    # routing, credit discipline, workflows (~130 lines)
└── references/
    ├── mcp-tools.md            # full parameter reference for the 6 tools
    ├── rest-api.md             # REST fallback — endpoints, curl, validation rules
    ├── auth-setup.md           # getting and persisting an API key
    └── errors.md               # error codes, retry policy, false alarms

Only name + description (~100 tokens) load at startup. The body loads when the skill activates; the references load only when actually consulted.

Looking for the granular skills? v1.0.0 shipped 13 overlapping skills (transcript, captions, subtitles, yt, …). They were alias variants of one another, and thirteen near-identical descriptions competing at startup made skill selection worse, not better. They're consolidated here. The standalone, API-key-based versions still live in ZeroPointRepo/youtube-skills.

💡 Use cases

🔐 Authentication

There are no credentials in this package. Agent Plugins 1.0.0 has no portable field for embedding secrets, and authorization is client-managed.

OAuth 2.1 _{· recommended}

• Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) — Claude Desktop, Claude Web, ChatGPT and every Agent Plugins client. Just add the plugin; the client auto-registers and you authorize once via browser redirect. No key to copy.
• Static registration — optional on ChatGPT. Get Client ID + Secret from the MCP Integration Dashboard.

API key

Universal fallback, and what the REST skills use.

1. Get your key from your dashboard — keys start with sk_
2. Send it as a Bearer token: "Authorization": "Bearer sk_your_api_key_here"

For skills, export it once:

export TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY="sk_your_key_here"

Security: store keys in environment variables and never commit them to version control. When you install a skill, most agents will offer to run the free signup + OTP flow and save the key for you automatically.

💳 Pricing & rate limits

• 1 credit = 1 successful request (HTTP 200).
• Failed and rate-limited requests do not consume credits.
• get_channel_latest_videos is free.

View pricing · Manage credits

🚨 Troubleshooting

Three more worth knowing:

• Key saved but the agent can't see it. Shell config files load per shell type — check the table above and make sure the file matches the shell your agent actually runs in. Restarting the agent after saving resolves most cases.
• Live streams and premieres. Transcripts appear after the stream ends and captions are processed, not while live.
• Unexpected transcript language. Many videos only carry captions in their original language. Request a preferred language, or ask your agent to translate the result.

📁 Repo layout

transcriptapi-plugin/
├── plugin.json                 # Agent Plugins 1.0.0 manifest (canonical $schema)
├── mcp.json                    # hosted MCP server — streamable-http, OAuth, no keys
├── skills/
│   └── youtube/                # one skill: SKILL.md + references/ (progressive disclosure)
├── assets/                     # black-background brand marks (SVG + PNG 64→1024)
├── server.json                 # MCP Registry descriptor
├── smithery.yaml · glama.json  # directory listings
├── marketplace.json            # marketplace index (single-plugin)
├── .claude-plugin/ .cursor-plugin/ .codex-plugin/ .plugin/
│                               # per-client discovery paths — same metadata, one per client
└── .github/workflows/          # CI: validates both manifests against the canonical schemas

The canonical package is plugin.json + skills/ + mcp.json. Everything else is discovery convenience for clients that look elsewhere first.

✅ Verify this package

No secrets, no executable code, no stdio servers — nothing here runs on your machine. Check it yourself.

1. Manifests against the canonical schemas:

curl -sO https://agent-plugins.org/schemas/1.0.0/plugin.schema.json
curl -sO https://agent-plugins.org/schemas/1.0.0/mcp.schema.json
npx -y ajv-cli@5 validate --spec=draft2020 -s plugin.schema.json -d plugin.json
npx -y ajv-cli@5 validate --spec=draft2020 -s mcp.schema.json    -d mcp.json

2. Every skill against the Agent Skills specification. This is the check that actually matters: §7.1 requires skills to conform, and a conformant client silently skips any skill that doesn't. A plugin can have perfect manifests and still ship skills that never load.

pip install "git+https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills.git#subdirectory=skills-ref"
for d in skills/*/; do skills-ref validate "$d"; done

It prints Valid skill.

3. The normative requirements a schema can't express — path safety, discovery depth, reverse-domain extension namespaces, transport rules:

python .github/scripts/check_conformance.py

CI runs the skill validation and the conformance checker on every pull request. The ajv step above is the canonical schema check — check_conformance.py enforces the same rules plus the ones a schema can't express, so running it locally is equivalent. See SECURITY.md.

🔗 Also available as a REST API

Building an app instead of an agent? The same backend ships as a JSON REST API.

Base URL: https://transcriptapi.com/api/v2

📋 MCP Registry

Published to the official Model Context Protocol Registry as:

com.transcriptapi/youtube-transcript-and-youtube-search

🔀 Related repos

• Standalone MCP server: ZeroPointRepo/youtube-mcp
• Standalone agent skills (API-key based): ZeroPointRepo/youtube-skills
• Verified Agent Plugins directory: ZeroPointRepo/awesome-agent-plugins

🤝 Connect

• 🌐 Website: transcriptapi.com
• 📚 Docs: transcriptapi.com/docs
• 🔧 API Reference: transcriptapi.com/docs/api
• 🤖 MCP setup guides: Claude · ChatGPT · OpenAI Agent Builder
• 💬 Contact: transcriptapi.com/contact

Contributing

PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Disclosure

TranscriptAPI is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google.

_{© 2026 TranscriptAPI · Released under the MIT License}