youtube-watch-mcp

An MCP server that tracks your favorite YouTube creators and tells you when they've posted something new — right from Claude.

You:    Add MKBHD to my YouTube watchlist
Claude: Now watching "Marques Brownlee" (UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ).
        Latest upload so far: "The Best Car I've Ever Driven: McLaren W1"
        — future checks will only report videos newer than this.

You:    Did any of my channels post something new?
Claude: Checked 3 channel(s), found 1 new video total.
        Marques Brownlee: 1 new video
        - "..." (2026-07-05) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...

No YouTube API key, no Google Cloud project, no quotas — it reads each channel's public RSS feed.

Features

• add_channel — start tracking a creator by channel ID, @handle, or channel URL
• remove_channel — stop tracking one
• list_channels — see everything you're watching
• check_new_videos — check one channel, or all of them, for uploads since the last check
• get_latest_videos — browse any channel's recent uploads without touching tracking state
• A watchlist://channels resource exposing your current watchlist as JSON

How it works internally

┌─────────────┐   stdio (JSON-RPC)   ┌────────────────────┐   HTTPS   ┌──────────────────────┐
│ Claude       │ ───────────────────▶ │ youtube-watch-mcp  │ ────────▶ │ YouTube (public)     │
│ (MCP client) │ ◀─────────────────── │ (this server)      │ ◀──────── │ RSS + channel pages  │
└─────────────┘                      └────────────────────┘           └──────────────────────┘
                                              │
                                              ▼
                                     data/watchlist.json
                                     (local, persisted state)

Transport. The server communicates with its client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.) over stdio — the client spawns node dist/index.js as a subprocess and exchanges JSON-RPC messages over stdin/stdout. This is the standard local-server transport in MCP; nothing is exposed over the network.

Tools vs. resources. Each capability above (add_channel, check_new_videos, ...) is registered as an MCP tool — a function with a typed input schema (validated with zod) that the model can decide to call based on your request. watchlist://channels is registered as an MCP resource instead — a read-only piece of data a client can pull in as context without "calling" anything.

Resolving a channel with no API key (src/youtube.ts). When you pass a @handle or a channel URL, the server fetches that page's plain HTML and extracts the channel's real ID from it. This turned out to be less trivial than it sounds: a channel page's HTML contains dozens of "channelId":"UC..." strings for unrelated channels (recommended/related-channel shelves), so grabbing the first match resolves to the wrong creator. Instead, the server reads the page's <link rel="canonical"> tag and "externalId" field — both of which specifically identify the page's own owner. If you pass a raw channel ID (UC...) directly, none of this scraping happens.

Fetching uploads (src/youtube.ts). Every YouTube channel exposes a public Atom feed at:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...

No auth, no quota — but it only returns the ~15 most recent uploads. The server parses this XML with fast-xml-parser into a simple { channelTitle, videos[] } shape, where videos is ordered newest-first.

Tracking "new since last time" (src/index.ts, src/storage.ts). For each watched channel, the server persists the ID of the most recent video it has seen. check_new_videos walks the freshly-fetched feed from newest to oldest and collects every video until it hits that last-seen ID (or runs out of feed, if the channel posted more than ~15 videos since the last check). It then updates the stored ID to the current newest video. add_channel seeds this "last seen" value immediately with the channel's current latest upload, so adding a channel never immediately reports its entire back-catalog as "new."

Storage (src/storage.ts). The watchlist lives in data/watchlist.json, next to the compiled server — a flat JSON array of { channelId, nickname, addedAt, lastVideoId, lastCheckedAt }. No database; it's just read, mutated, and rewritten on every change.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+

Install & build

git clone https://github.com/Achanandhi-M/youtube-watch-mcp.git
cd youtube-watch-mcp
npm install
npm run build

This compiles TypeScript from src/ into dist/.

Connect it to Claude Code

claude mcp add youtube-watch -- node /absolute/path/to/youtube-watch-mcp/dist/index.js

Restart/reconnect Claude Code and the tools listed above become available.

Connect it to Claude Desktop

Add this to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS) under mcpServers, then restart the app:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youtube-watch": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/youtube-watch-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Usage examples

• "Add MKBHD and Veritasium to my YouTube watchlist"
• "Check if any of my watched creators posted something new"
• "Show me the last 5 videos from @fireship without adding it to my watchlist"
• "Stop tracking Veritasium"

Limitations

• YouTube's RSS feed only returns the ~15 most recent uploads per channel. If a channel you're tracking goes unchecked for long enough to publish more than that, older uploads in between won't be reported as "new" — check regularly rather than sporadically.
• Channel resolution from @handle/URL scrapes public HTML rather than using an official API, so it could break if YouTube changes its page markup. Using a direct channel ID (UC...) with add_channel avoids this entirely.
• No notifications/push — this is a pull-based tool. Nothing checks in the background; a check only happens when you (via Claude) ask for one.

Project structure

src/
  index.ts     MCP server: tool + resource definitions
  youtube.ts   Channel resolution + RSS feed fetching/parsing
  storage.ts   JSON-file watchlist persistence
data/
  watchlist.json   Your tracked channels (gitignored, created on first run)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.