How do I let Claude read and summarize a YouTube video?

You paste a 90-minute conference talk into Claude and ask what it says about pricing. Claude cannot open YouTube on its own, so it either refuses or guesses from the title. Give it a tool that returns the transcript and it can quote the talk, with the second each point was made. Transcript MCP servers that scrape YouTube from your own machine often stop with 429 errors after a few videos; a hosted server keeps that problem away from you.

Connect it

In Claude Code, add this to .mcp.json in your project and keep the key in OKDATA_API_KEY:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "okdata": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.okdata.online/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${OKDATA_API_KEY}" }
    }
  }
}

Run /mcp to check it is connected. Claude Desktop and other clients are covered on the MCP page.

Then ask in plain words

• "Summarize this talk in ten bullets with timestamps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…"
• "Which tools does this tutorial recommend, and at what minute?"
• "Read the top comments too. Do viewers agree with the speaker?"

Claude looks up the tools with find and describe, which are free, then calls YouTube video transcript, video detail and, if asked, video comments.

What a summary costs

Task	Calls	Cost
Transcript only	1	$0.004
Transcript, details, two comment pages	4	{{cost:youtube.videos.transcript.get1+youtube.videos.get1+youtube.videos.comments.list*2}}
A week of 10 talks, transcripts only	10	$0.04

The same call from a script, if you want it outside Claude:

curl -s -G "https://api.okdata.online/v1/youtube/videos/transcript/get" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OKDATA_API_KEY" -d id=VIDEO_ID -d fields=lang,text

Limits worth telling Claude about

• Words only. Claude reads the captions, not the picture. Slides, demos and on-screen code are invisible unless someone says them.
• No captions, no summary. A video without captions returns not_found and is not charged; Claude should say so instead of inventing content.
• Long talks are long. A 90-minute transcript is a lot of text. Asking for fields=text drops the timed segments when you do not need timestamps.
• Comments are untrusted. They are written by strangers. Tell Claude to treat them as data and never as instructions.
• No channel stats. Subscriber counts are not returned.

Other routes

For your own videos, YouTube Studio already has the captions. For a one-off, YouTube's own Show transcript panel lets you copy the text into Claude by hand. And if you need many transcripts in a batch rather than a chat, see the video transcript solution page.