youty-mcp

Local MCP server that lets AI assistants use the videos you saved with Youty: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, and any other MCP client.

What your AI can do

The server also tells clients when to use Youty (MCP instructions), so an assistant reaches for your vault before the web when a question concerns videos you saved. Responses are compact Markdown sized to stay well inside client limits.

Install

Claude Desktop: in the Youty app, Settings → Onboarding → Add to Claude Desktop — or open Youty.mcpb. Claude Desktop brings its own runtime; nothing else to install.

Claude Code: install the plugin (adds the server plus a short research skill):

claude plugin marketplace add legetdev/youty && claude plugin install youty@youty

Everything else (needs uv: brew install uv):

uvx youty-mcp@latest install           # wires every MCP client it finds
uvx youty-mcp@latest install --list    # supported clients + config paths
uvx youty-mcp@latest install cursor    # just one
uvx youty-mcp@latest uninstall         # remove Youty again

The installer merges a youty entry into each client's config, preserves your other settings, is safe to re-run, and skips clients that already have Youty through the plugin or extension. Clients launch uvx youty-mcp@latest, so a restart always loads the newest server. To wire a client by hand, use {"command": "uvx", "args": ["youty-mcp@latest"]}.

On-device search

Queries are embedded on your Mac with Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 (Apache-2.0) — the same model the Youty app used to index transcripts, on-screen text, and frames, so one query vector compares against all three. It runs on the CPU in a small helper process that starts with the first search (well under a second) and exits a minute after the last one, so an idle server holds no model in memory. Later searches take about 40 ms each. Keyword matching (SQLite FTS5) runs alongside it for exact names and terms. No key, no account, no remote embedding call.

The server reuses the model files of an installed Youty app or Homebrew CLI. Only if neither is present does it download Youty's checksummed models asset once into ~/.cache/youty/models/. Set YOUTY_MODELS_DIR to use a local copy.

Your AI client receives the results it requests and may send them to its own provider under its own privacy settings.

Index location

The Mac app's index: ~/Library/Containers/dev.leget.youty/Data/Library/Application Support/Youty/index.db (falls back to ~/Library/Application Support/Youty/index.db). Override with YOUTY_INDEX_DB=/abs/path. The index is rebuildable from the vault's video.md files and frames: Settings → Re-index entire vault in the app.

Develop

cd youty-mcp
uv sync --locked
uv run pytest -q

Troubleshooting

• No results — check that the vault has videos (list_videos) and that indexing is on in the app (Settings → AI search index).
• "keyword matching only" — the on-device model couldn't load. Install or update the Youty app, or let the one-time model download finish.
• Just updated Youty — the app upgrades existing saves to the new search model in the background on first launch; keyword search works meanwhile.
• Logs: ~/Library/Logs/Youty/youty-mcp.log.