@pipeworx/youtube

YouTube videos, channels, comments and transcripts: search, video and channel metadata with view/like counts, comment threads, and the caption text of a video.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1763+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• yt_search(query, type?, …) — videos, channels or playlists matching a term.
• yt_video_details(video_id) — title, description, duration, view/like/comment counts, tags.
• yt_channel_details(channel_id | username) — subscriber, video and view counts.
• yt_channel_videos(channel_id, …) — a channel's recent uploads.
• yt_video_comments(video_id, …) — top-level comment threads.
• yt_video_transcript(video_id, lang?, start_seconds?, max_chars?) — the video's captions as timestamped segments plus the joined text, the track language, and whether it is auto-generated. Accepts a bare ID or a youtube.com / youtu.be URL. Long videos are paged: the response carries truncated and next_start_seconds; pass that back as start_seconds.

Auth

• yt_video_transcript — keyless.
• Everything else — BYO only: a YouTube Data API v3 key from Google Cloud Console, passed as _apiKey. Pipeworx does not front a shared key.

Data sources

• https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3 — the Data API (all tools except the transcript).
• https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player — YouTube's own player endpoint, called with the ANDROID client context; its captionTracks[].baseUrl is then fetched with fmt=json3 for the transcript.

The transcript upstream is fragile. It is an undocumented endpoint, not a published API, and YouTube can change it without notice. What we know as of 2026-10-09 (edge-probed from a Worker, fleet #2846):

• The WEB watch page lists the same caption tracks, but their URLs carry exp=xpe and need a PO token: fetched bare they answer 200 with a 0-byte body. That is a silent empty transcript, so the WEB route is not used. The ANDROID client's track URLs fetch without one.
• YouTube intermittently answers datacenter IPs with LOGIN_REQUIRED "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot". It lands per request rather than per video: through the live gateway it hit 7 of 10 consecutive calls with a single attempt, and then let the same videos through. So the tool tries the ANDROID client, then IOS (both give caption URLs that need no PO token; ANDROID_VR does not qualify, it was bot-checked on every probe). If both are refused it opens the public watch page. If that page shows the video plays and has no caption tracks, the answer is captions_unavailable. Otherwise both clients are retried carrying the visitor ID and cookies the page handed out. Only after all four are refused does the call fail upstream_down, saying that YouTube is blocking our servers. It never returns an empty transcript. The watch page itself answers 429 from some egress IPs, and in that case it is skipped.
• Translation (&tlang=) answers 429 from a datacenter IP, so a language the video has no track for is refused (captions_unavailable, listing the tracks it does have) rather than machine-translated.
• A video with no caption tracks fails captions_unavailable. A private, removed or region-blocked video fails not_found with YouTube's own reason.

If this starts failing for every video, check the ANDROID clientVersion in src/index.ts first — YouTube retires old client versions.

The egress relay is NOT the fallback after that. Measured and ruled out 2026-10-09 (fleet #2877). It was the obvious next move and it is strictly worse than what we have. Probed from a throwaway function on the relay's own Supabase edge infra, against www.youtube.com:

So the block is scoped to exactly one endpoint — the innertube player call — and that is the only leg that fails on Cloudflare today. The relay refuses it 100% of the time; Cloudflare egress refuses it 40% (8 of 20 live yt_video_transcript calls across 10 videos, 2026-10-09). Routing the player call through the relay would take the tool from partly working to never working, which is why www.youtube.com is deliberately absent from the relay's ALLOWED_HOSTS (there is a note there saying so). The two legs that do pass the relay are not the ones that need help.

Measuring the 40% needs care: the gateway caches tool responses, so a probe that repeats identical arguments reads far too healthy. An un-busted run of the same 10 videos scored 14/16; varying max_chars per call to defeat the cache gave 12/20. Vary an argument or you will measure the cache.

What is actually left, none of it tried: a residential/mobile proxy (costs money, so it is Bruce's call), a PO-token minter so the WEB route's exp=xpe URLs stop answering 0 bytes, or accepting the 40% and making the retry advice in the error message the answer.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/youtube/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/youtube/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1763+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

This pack takes your own API key (_apiKey) — we don't front one for it, so there's no curl here that would run without it. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/yt_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-youtube"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-youtube

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Youtube data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT