youtube-connector-mcp
Provides a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects an MCP client (e.g., Claude/Cursor/etc.) to the YouTube Data API v3 to search and fetch YouTube data such as videos, channels, playlists, transcripts, and comments.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Uses a Google Cloud YouTube API key provided via environment variable (better than hard-coding). README recommends restricting the key to YouTube Data API v3. Scope granularity is not described at the tool level (single key for all operations). TLS is not discussed in README; security score assumes standard HTTPS usage by google-api-python-client. Dependency hygiene cannot be fully verified from provided content; also note 'Development Status :: 4 - Beta' suggests potential for security hardening gaps.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You want an agent tool that can call YouTube Data API v3 from an MCP-capable client using an environment-provided API key.
Avoid When
You need strict transcript completeness/availability guarantees or want to avoid handling a YouTube API key on the client machine.
Use Cases
- • AI-assisted YouTube research (search and summarize content)
- • Extracting transcripts (with timestamps) for downstream NLP
- • Gathering channel/playlist metadata and statistics
- • Building automated workflows that ingest YouTube data into tools/agents
Not For
- • Replacing a full YouTube analytics platform
- • Performing large-scale scraping beyond documented YouTube API usage policies
- • Applications needing guaranteed transcript availability for all videos
- • Use as a hosted service for multi-tenant access without additional deployment/security hardening
Interface
Authentication
Authentication is via a YouTube Data API v3 key provided as an environment variable. README suggests optionally restricting the key to the YouTube Data API v3 in Google Cloud.
Pricing
No package-specific paid tiers are described; usage depends on YouTube API quotas.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Transcript availability is not guaranteed (captions may be missing/disabled; may take time after upload).
- ⚠ YouTube may block requests from certain IPs (README points to workarounds via youtube-transcript-api documentation).
- ⚠ API quota/limits can cause failures (README mentions a daily unit default and 'quota exceeded').
- ⚠ Transcript retrieval may be slower or rate-limited compared to metadata endpoints (implied by troubleshooting notes, not explicitly documented).
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-30.