AI-Powered YouTube Shorts Generator — MCP-Driven Video Automation

Overview

AI-Powered YouTube Shorts Generator automates a faceless Shorts channel. It turns posts from r/Jokes, r/LifeProTips and r/Stories into short videos with narration, subtitles, stock footage and music, then uploads them to YouTube.

The project stands out for using the Model Context Protocol (MCP): n8n AI agents talk to a self-hosted short-video-maker server through MCP client tools, so the LLM can decide how to build each video instead of following a hard-coded script.

How it works

• Three parallel pipelines read subreddit RSS feeds, map and aggregate posts, and hand them to an AI agent.
• The agent (GPT-4o-mini / GPT-4.1-mini, or local Mistral Small via Ollama) adapts each post into a video script with structured output parsing, and requests rendering through the MCP server.
• The server produces TTS narration, pulls relevant Pexels background clips, overlays subtitles and adds music.
• The workflow polls render status in wait loops, downloads the finished file and uploads it to YouTube with generated metadata.
• A separate custom-generation branch fetches available music tags, lets the LLM pick a mood and calls the server's REST API directly.

Engineering notes

Structured output parsers keep agent responses machine-readable, and the README documents practical gotchas such as switching n8n to filesystem binary-data mode to avoid failed YouTube uploads.