rippr

YouTube transcript ripper for humans and AI agents.

Website · Chrome Web Store · MCP Server (npm)

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Three ways to use rippr

🌐 Website — rippr.me

Paste a YouTube URL, get the transcript. Clean text, no signup.

🧩 Chrome Extension — Chrome Web Store

One-click transcript extraction directly on any YouTube page. Multiple output formats (RAG, JSON, Markdown).

🤖 MCP Server — npm

Connect rippr to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client. Saves each transcript to ~/rippr/transcripts/ and returns the file path to the model.

Desktop clients only. rippr runs as a local stdio process, so it works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code CLI, and Cursor. It does not work with cloud-hosted clients (claude.ai on the web, the Claude mobile app, or Claude Code on phone / web), which can't spawn local processes.

npx rippr-mcp

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

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

Then ask: "Rip this YouTube video: [url]". See mcp/README.md for the full tool surface.

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Output formats

• RAG (.txt) — single continuous text block, optimized for chunking and embedding
• Structured (.json) — timestamped segments with metadata
• Readable (.md) — markdown with headers and formatting

How it works

Multi-strategy extraction for maximum reliability:

1. Innertube API — YouTube's internal player API (Android client)
2. HTML scraping — parses ytInitialPlayerResponse from page source
3. Transcript panel — opens YouTube's built-in transcript panel as last resort

Caption XML parsed in multiple formats (srv3, timedtext, JSON3). Retry with exponential backoff on transient failures.

Privacy

Runs entirely on your machine. No data sent to external servers. No accounts, no tracking. Only communicates with YouTube's own APIs.

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Disclaimer

Rippr accesses publicly available YouTube transcript data through endpoints that YouTube's own apps use. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google LLC. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC.

Use is subject to YouTube's Terms of Service. Use at your own risk. The author accepts no liability for takedowns, rate limits, account actions, or any other consequences of use.

If YouTube adjusts their internal APIs in ways that break extraction, the tool may stop working without notice. For long-term production use, consider the official YouTube Data API v3 with an API key (not currently supported in this package).

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial MCP server. Not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google LLC.

License

MIT