glennlzl/youtube-crawler-mcp

YouTube Crawler MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for YouTube data crawling with AI-powered summarization. Built with FastMCP for easy deployment as both local and remote MCP server.

✨ Features

• Channel metadata retrieval
• AI video summaries with automatic transcription (Whisper API)
• Time-range queries for videos
• Supports videos with/without subtitles
• Multi-language support with smart language detection
• Dual transport: stdio (local) and Streamable HTTP (remote)
• Cloud-ready: Deploy to AWS, Google Cloud Run, Fly.io, etc.

🚀 Quick Start

Local Usage (stdio)

# Install dependencies
pip install -e .

# Configure environment
export YOUTUBE_API_KEY=your_youtube_key
export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key
export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=your_deepseek_key

# Run with stdio (for Claude Desktop)
python main.py stdio

Remote Server (Streamable HTTP)

# Run HTTP server
python main.py streamable-http

# Server will start on http://0.0.0.0:8080
# Use with Claude API, Lambda, or other cloud agents

Docker

# Build
docker build -t youtube-crawler-mcp .

# Run
docker run -p 8080:8080 \
  -e YOUTUBE_API_KEY=your_key \
  -e OPENAI_API_KEY=your_key \
  -e DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=your_key \
  youtube-crawler-mcp

MCP Tools

1. Get Channel Metadata

{
  "username": "@channel_name"
}

2. Get Latest Videos Summary

{
  "username": "@channel_name",
  "n": 5,
  "include_transcript": false
}

3. Get Videos by Time Range

{
  "username": "@channel_name",
  "start_date": "2024-01-01",
  "end_date": "2024-01-31",
  "max_videos": 10
}

Configuration

AI Providers

• DeepSeek (recommended): $0.28/1M tokens input, $0.42/1M output
• OpenAI: GPT-4 models
• Anthropic: Claude models

Set AI_PROVIDER in .env to switch providers.

Transcription

Uses OpenAI Whisper API ($0.006/minute) with automatic language detection from YouTube metadata.

Claude Desktop Integration

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-crawler": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "src.server"],
      "cwd": "/path/to/youtubeCrawlerMcp"
    }
  }
}

Docker Deployment

Build and Run Locally

# Build image
docker build -t youtube-crawler-mcp .

# Run with docker-compose
docker-compose up

Deploy to AWS Fargate

See for detailed AWS Fargate deployment instructions.

Testing

# Test with specific channel
python test_m2story.py

Cost Estimates

• Transcription: ~$0.18 per 30-min video (Whisper API)
• Summary: ~$0.004 per video (DeepSeek)
• Total: ~$0.184 per video

License

MIT