oratilo-mcp

MCP server for oratilo — a shared library of YouTube videos re-edited into concept-structured summaries.

What it's for: before an agent spends work summarizing a video, it can check whether a summary already exists. A cache is only a cache if something reads it.

Install

Node 18+. No dependencies. Plain MCP over stdio, so any MCP client can run it.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --scope user oratilo -- npx -y oratilo-mcp

Codex CLI — codex mcp add, or in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.oratilo]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "oratilo-mcp"]

Kimi CLI — /mcp-config in the TUI, or in ~/.kimi/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "oratilo": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "oratilo-mcp"] }
  }
}

Anything else — the JSON block above is the common shape (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline …); drop it into that client's MCP config file. If you drive GLM / Z.ai or another model through one of these clients, configure the client, not the model provider.

Verify with /mcp in whichever client you used.

What you get

Prompt — summarize. One command for people. Give it a YouTube link; it asks which language you want, looks the video up in oratilo, and hands back the existing summary if there is one. If there isn't, it summarizes the video for you normally.

If your client doesn't support MCP prompts, you won't see this command — that's fine. The server sends the same guidance in its instructions at connect time, so just ask in plain language ("summarize this video: <url>") and the agent will check the library first.

Tool — oratilo_lookup. Exact check for one video. Returns the full summary plus provenance: source, format, updated, and the model recorded when it was generated. Miss means the library doesn't cover that video.

Tool — oratilo_search. Full-text search over the library when you don't have a URL — by topic, phrase, person or company. Returns ranked matches with page links and snippets; follow up with oratilo_lookup for the full text.

Both tools take an optional lang (ko · en · ja · es; default ko).

Verifying a summary

Claims carry footnote markers [n] that map to a timestamp list at the end of each summary. Deep-link source + &t=<seconds>s to check any single claim against the video itself. oratilo stores no transcripts — a summary is an original re-edit, not a transcription.

Scope and limits

• Read-only. oratilo is a single-author library today; there is no contribution endpoint, so a miss simply means the video isn't covered.
• The server talks only to oratilo.com public data. It never contacts YouTube.
• The corpus is small and deliberately curated — expect misses.
• Summaries can be wrong. Every page has a correction-report link, and updated changes when a page is revised.

ORATILO_BASE may point the server at a localhost origin for development. Any other host is refused and the server falls back to oratilo.com — otherwise a hostile origin could feed an agent invented text as "oratilo's summary". Responses from a development origin carry a warning and drop the citation guidance.

License

MIT. See oratilo.com/terms for the library's own terms.