Claude Code + MagicSlides MCPTurn a YouTube video into a PPT with Claude Code
Claude Code can run yt-dlp in your terminal to pull a video's captions, read the transcript, and turn a long talk into a few slides. With the MagicSlides MCP added, the deck comes back as a present link and PPTX.
Set up MagicSlides in Claude Code (one time)
Run this once. Add --scope user to make MagicSlides available in every project.
claude mcp add --transport http magicslides https://www.magicslides.app/api/mcp/mcp/mcpPick magicslides and log in with MagicSlides in the browser tab that opens.
- 1.Run the command in your terminal.
- 2.Start claude, type /mcp, select magicslides and log in.
- 3.Ask for a deck. Claude Code calls the MagicSlides tools and prints the links.
Example: what you type in Claude Code
Use yt-dlp to grab the English captions for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g, read the transcript, and make a 6-slide summary for our team with the key numbers from the talk.
Source used: [1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models, Andrej Karpathy (59:48)
- Ran yt-dlp --skip-download --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --sub-format vtt
- Cleaned the VTT into a 12,000-word transcript and pulled the training numbers and security section
- Called get_template_schema (creative-design, 6 slides)
- Wrote the slot copy and called create_presentation_from_slots with stock images
Built a 6-slide summary: the two-file model (140 GB of Llama 2 70B weights), 6,000 GPUs for 12 days at about $2M, pre-training vs fine-tuning, the LLM-as-OS idea, and jailbreaks, prompt injection and data poisoning.
This is the real output from that prompt, made with the MagicSlides MCP. Open it to click through or download it.
How it works
- 1.Run claude mcp add --transport http magicslides https://www.magicslides.app/api/mcp/mcp in your terminal.
- 2.Start Claude Code and run /mcp to log in with MagicSlides.
- 3.Paste a YouTube link and ask it to fetch the captions with yt-dlp and summarise into slides.
- 4.Open the present link or download the PPTX from the reply.
Tool used: create_presentation_from_slots. Prefer a web app? YouTube to PPT does the same without an agent.
FAQ
How does Claude Code get the transcript?
It runs yt-dlp in your shell with --skip-download and --write-auto-subs, then reads the caption file.
What if the video has no captions?
yt-dlp needs English captions, manual or auto-generated. Without them there is no transcript to read.
Do I need yt-dlp installed?
Yes. Claude Code runs the command on your machine, so yt-dlp has to be installed there.
Does it cost AI credits?
No. Claude Code writes the slide copy, and the bring-your-own-content path costs 0 MagicSlides AI credits.
More with Claude Code
YouTube to PPT in other agents
Connect MagicSlides to Claude Code
One MCP server for decks, docs, sheets and reels. Log in with your MagicSlides account, no API key. Making a deck from your own copy uses no AI credits.
