youty-mcp 1.1.0

Youty MCP server — exposes the Youty vault index (sqlite-vec + FTS5) to MCP-compatible AIs.

youty-mcp

Local MCP server that exposes the Youty vault's vector index to any MCP-compatible AI (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor).

What it does

Six tools, hybrid dense + BM25 retrieval over your captured YouTube / Instagram / TikTok videos, plus joint text → frame retrieval via Google's SigLIP-Base-Patch16-224 (Apache-2.0). Queries land in ~300 ms for text, ~32 ms warm for frames on Apple Silicon.

Tool	Returns
search(query, k=15, platform?, since_iso?)	hybrid dense + BM25 + RRF over transcript chunks; top-k results with frame paths + video_md_path
search_frames(query, k=10, platform?)	SigLIP-Base joint text→image; top-k frame matches with parent video metadata
get_transcript(video_id)	full video.md + parsed frontmatter
get_video(video_id)	frontmatter + folder listing + frame paths
list_videos(platform?, channel?, limit=100)	newest-first listing
find_similar(video_id, k=10)	nearest videos by averaged body-chunk vectors

Install

cd youty-mcp
uv sync                       # creates .venv, installs deps

Dependencies: mcp, sqlite-vec, httpx, numpy, transformers, sentence-transformers, torch, sentencepiece, protobuf. Python ≥ 3.11. Text queries are embedded on-device with EmbeddingGemma, matching how the index was built; frame queries use SigLIP via transformers. Frame image embeddings come from the Mac app's bundled CoreML encoder, so this server never needs coremltools itself.

Text search: 100% on-device — no key, zero config

The server embeds each query on-device with the same model the index was built with, read from index_meta.current_text_model, so query and document vectors share one space. That model is Google's EmbeddingGemma, run locally via sentence-transformers — no key, no provider option, no cloud call of any kind. The weights download from HuggingFace on the first text search (one-time per machine, ~1.2 GB, cached in ~/.cache/huggingface/); every query after that is fully offline.

SigLIP weights (auto-downloaded for frame-text queries)

The frame side (image embedding) is handled by the Mac app and CLI via a CoreML .mlpackage of SigLIP-Base bundled inside the app at Youty.app/Contents/Resources/SigLIP-Base-224_image.mlmodelc. No download required — it ships with the binary.

The text side (this server's query embedding) downloads google/siglip-base-patch16-224 (~370 MB) from HuggingFace on the first search_frames call. Cached in the standard HuggingFace cache:

~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--google--siglip-base-patch16-224/

One-time per machine. Hot-path embed is ~32 ms on Apple Silicon.

Claude Desktop wiring

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "youty": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["youty-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. Then ask: "What are best practices on creating AI influencers, and what tools should I use? Use my Youty vault."

Claude Code wiring

claude mcp add youty -- uvx youty-mcp

Tests

uv run pytest -q
uv run python tests/smoke_live.py    # one-shot live on-device search smoke

Index location

Default: the Mac app's sandboxed index at ~/Library/Containers/dev.leget.youty/Data/Library/Application Support/Youty/index.db, falling back to ~/Library/Application Support/Youty/index.db if that isn't present. Override either with YOUTY_INDEX_DB=/abs/path.

The Mac app writes here when it saves a video (background, non-blocking). The MCP server reads here and promotes data to sqlite-vec and FTS5 virtual tables at startup.

The index is rebuildable from the vault's video.md files alone — losing it is recoverable, never catastrophic. Use the Mac app's Settings window → "Re-index entire vault", or run headless:

"/path/to/youty.app/Contents/MacOS/youty" --reindex "/path/to/vault"
"/path/to/youty.app/Contents/MacOS/youty" --index-frames "/path/to/vault"

Troubleshooting

• search returns 0 results — the index is empty. Save a video from the Mac app (indexer enabled in Settings) or run --reindex on an existing vault. No key needed — text indexing is on-device by default.
• search_frames is slow on the first call — the SigLIP text encoder downloads ~370 MB of weights from HuggingFace into ~/.cache/huggingface/ (one-time per machine). On the Mac-app side the bundled SigLIP CoreML image encoder compiles to Neural Engine on first use (~1 s). Subsequent queries are ~32 ms.
• Legacy bundles with 4-digit-second JPEG names (0717.jpg) are silently skipped by frame indexing. The current contract is 8-digit milliseconds (00718000.jpg). Re-saving the video regenerates frames in the new format.
• Vault location unknown error from get_transcript — the indexer records the vault path; if you've changed it, run --reindex once against the new path so index_meta.vault_root updates.