youtube-watch

youtube-watch is a skill for Claude Code from brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp. It costs 81 tokens per session (687 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for reading YouTube videos through their transcripts, including searching for a topic or extracting a specific time range. A transcript is the written version of the video's spoken content.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to get video information, read transcripts, find timestamped mentions, extract sections, and analyse content from a YouTube URL.
Why use it?
It avoids loading an entire long video transcript when only one part matters. It first checks the video's details and whether captions are available, and can use speech recognition when captions are missing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the youtube-watch-mcp plugin — 1 skill, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to get video information, read transcripts, find timestamped mentions, extract sections, and analyse content from a YouTube URL.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp --skill youtube-watch
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install youtube-watch-mcp, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for youtube-watch

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for youtube-watch

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp/youtube-watch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 687 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00081 $0.00687
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00344
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00137
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00069

Measured 11d ago against content hash 39d8e726d020, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-watch scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/youtube-watch/SKILL.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Watching a YouTube video

Goal: get a video's content into context efficiently — never dump a whole transcript when a search or a slice will do. Long videos otherwise blow the token budget.

Decide the approach with get_info first

Call get_info(url) (MCP) or youtube-watch-mcp-cli info URL. It returns title, duration, chapters, and has_captions — cheap, no transcript. Use it to choose:

  • Short video (< ~10 min)get_transcript, then read the whole file.
  • Long videoget_transcript for the path + preview, then search_transcript or get_segment to pull only what's relevant. Do not read the full file.
  • No captions (has_captions: false) → transcript needs ASR (--asr, slower, opt-in); warn the user before doing it.

Tools (MCP server youtube-watch-mcp)

Tool When
get_info(url) Always first. Metadata + caption availability.
get_transcript(url, lang?) Get the cleaned transcript. Returns a file path + preview, not the full text.
search_transcript(url, query) Find where something is said. Returns timestamped snippets.
get_segment(url, start, end) Read one time range (seconds).

get_transcript writes the cleaned transcript to a cache file and returns its path. For a short video, read that file. For a long one, prefer search/segment.

Reading the transcript file

The path from get_transcript points at cleaned prose in ~/.cache/youtube-mcp/<video_id>/transcript.txt. Read it with the normal Read tool, or grep it — it's already de-duplicated and stripped of markup/noise.

CLI fallback (no MCP server)

If the MCP server isn't connected, use the command directly:

youtube-watch-mcp-cli info    "URL"
youtube-watch-mcp-cli transcript "URL"          # -> prints cache path + preview
youtube-watch-mcp-cli search  "URL" "query"     # -> [m:ss] snippet
youtube-watch-mcp-cli segment "URL" 120 180     # -> text in [120s, 180s)

Answering the user

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 58 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 39d8e726d020

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-watch is a skill published in the GitHub repository brian-huanggg/youtube-mcp (0 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 687 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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