8 ms·

YouTube has apparently reinstated RSS feeds

224 points by sonicrocketman 10y ago

woodruffw 10y ago
I've been using this feature for a few months, in conjunction with my RSS reader. It's a very nice alternative to YouTube's UI, as I can just pipe my stream of subscriptions to youtube-dl + my preferred native player. Glad to see someone else is doing so!
- totalizator 10y ago
  ++
- Solinoid 10y ago
  Hello, a bit off topic but what rss reader do you use to pipe?
eip 10y ago
They have always had RSS feeds. Maybe not easy to find but they do work.
- webwanderings 10y ago
  Agree. I have couple of RSS on few of the search keywords; have been working fine for a while now. Feedly (which I don't use on daily basis) makes it very hard to extract the feed URL. I lost track of how I discovered YouTube RSS links.
- kzrdude 10y ago
  They broke every RSS feed of channels in the folder I had. I've long deleted the folder now, and I'm unsure why I should trust them to have it work this time.
  - eip 10y ago
    Yea a few years ago they changed the format of the urls without redirecting the old urls. Weak sauce.
scottjad 10y ago
I don't think this is anything new. The feature they got rid of was a single RSS feed for all your subscriptions. They've had per channel RSS feeds and OPML export since they got rid of that, I believe.
- milankragujevic 10y ago
  I agree, they got rid of the single feed for all subscriptions, and that per-channel rss thing has existed for a long time and wasn't removed at all, afaik.
- rsoto 10y ago
  Yeah, I was confused as well, as I don't follow channels directly on YouTube, but via RSS, and I've been doing that for 5+ years, at least. For the curious, you can add a channel via this URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channelid> And follow a user via: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username>
  - ajanuary 10y ago
    I must be misremembering. From what I remember, I used to subscribe the RSS feeds per-channel, but then they all had posts saying this feature was going away, and then they stopped working. Did they just change the URL or something?
hyperanthony 10y ago
I hope this starts a trend. It has been very frustrating to see large services stop offering RSS feeds, often with no or cumbersome alternatives.
helper 10y ago
Interesting. A bunch of my old dead YouTube RSS feeds suddenly had new posts (of old videos) in them this week. They had killed off public rss feeds but you could still get an rss URL if you were singed in and subscribed to the channel.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  They must have changed how it worked for a while. I've been subscribing to YouTube channels without a YouTube account for about a year now. In the "Uploads" section of a channel, there's been a "link" tag to the RSS feed in the markup which most RSS clients will detect, if not, you could copy the link right out of the markup.
iKlsR 10y ago
I've been playing with the idea and have a prototype of a "Youtube Manager" for lack of not having a better name app powered by electron. I have some 300+ subscriptions (yeah I know... but these are curated very interesting channels that upload often) and yt's interface is horrible to keep track of uploads/subscriptions. I don't care for spamming my inbox when someone uploads or push notifications and I tend to miss uploads I look forward to at times. It has several layouts, my most used being a trello/tweetdeck setup with categories and fullscreen/overlayed video, also spent last weekend adding the mobile minimize video feature while able to search. It's been a sideproject for several months now and I find it highly useful but I was wondering if I should take the plunge and develop this into something more. I'm a bit hesitant seeing how youtube killed Streamus (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-with-300000-users/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-...). But since this has popped up, would this be something that people are genuinely interested in and or would it be wise to release into the wild? Edit: There exists http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube but this is way different and does more than just search, not as heavy either thanks to the chromium engine.
- SeanAnderson 10y ago
  Heh, developer of Streamus here! Found myself reading your comment, prepping to write a response, and then saw you'd already mentioned it! Huzzah! Overall, I wouldn't worry too much about what you're doing. Streamus was terminated because of complaints from record labels. That's not an issue you'd encounter. Just don't make it so good that it suddenly gets re-built in-house! :) The idea itself seems useful enough. I agree that many parts of YouTube's interface could have improved usability. It's difficult to get people to keep YouTube + your website open, but if you can implement enough of their features to warrant only being on your page then I don't see any issues.
  - iKlsR 10y ago
    I loved the heck out of that extension was also one of the early people giving feedback waay back, ended up just piping my playlists to youtube-dl via a cron near the end. I do recall reading a back and forth email convo between you and Yt where it seem they just randomly axed it for some opaque reason but thanks for the clarification. Thanks for the reply and tips! Edit: Apparently this is explained in the article I linked above, I just grabbed a random one to link to. I hadn't looked into it other than the imgur email chain.
kyriakos 10y ago
Awesome. YouTube becomes unmanageable if you subscribe to a lot of channels. There's no way to tag or put your channels in thematic groups which can now be fixed with an rss reader.
icanhackit 10y ago
Is it just me or has RSS been a recurring topic for the last few days? Not that I'm complaining, I love RSS, but it's been an oddly popular topic. It leaves me pondering whether publishers are beginning to consider it was a superior format for mass consumption that has been ignored at their own peril. There's just too much content out there and fatigue can quickly set in when hunting for suitable viewing material.
- losteric 10y ago
  I believe Youtube generates more ad revenue when it's viewed directly on the site, instead of embedded in another website (Facebook). Plus producers know their content gets fairly prioritized by the end user when it's consumed through RSS.
john111 10y ago
>To get an RSS feed of a single channel’s uploads, paste the channel URL into your RSS reader. How does this work? How does the feed-reader know to grab the RSS XML instead of the page HTML, if they have the same URL?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- justinator 10y ago
  The RSS reader just looks for the, <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="yourfeed.rss" /> tag(s) in the head of your document. So for example, my channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/leaddadaist https://www.youtube.com/user/leaddadaist Here's the tag in the source, <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCnQRp2dhO1SIp9--CSPmYpQ">
- sohkamyung 10y ago
  In Firefox, there is an option to customise the toolbar by adding a '(RSS) Subscribe' button to it. This becomes active when Firefox detects that a web page has an accompanying RSS feed. Clicking on it either brings you to the RSS feed directly or give you subscription options if multiple RSS/Atom feeds are found for the web page.
- jeffkeeling 10y ago
  I know it's not hard to piece the rss feed together yourself, but I made a little tool so all you need to is the youtube channel/playlist url and the feed gets generated: https://jeffkeeling.github.io/youtube_rss_extractor/ https://jeffkeeling.github.io/youtube_rss_extractor/
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I didn't know they were ever turned off. I don't have a Google account but I still want to see YouTube videos in my feed, so I have a script that subscribes to YT RSS feeds and emails them to me, with filters on my mail server to organize them. They've worked fine since I first set them up.
vidyesh 10y ago
This is not new at all. Go to https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager and you can see the export option at the bottom of the page. It was never removed nor disabled.
- talideon 10y ago
  That was never removed, but the single feed of your subscriptions was. Unfortunately, none of this replaces that.
wingerlang 10y ago
Nice. This makes it so I could see only the videos I care about, for example some channels have multiple "personalities" uploading to it but I care only about one of them. I guess combining this with some filters would be nice.
robotbarber666 10y ago
It used to be possible to get RSS for any YouTube search -- by keyword, not by channel. As far as I know, that's still gone.
leni536 10y ago
They apparently have atom feeds for playlists too, not only channels. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatever> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatev... AFAIK they don't advertise this anywhere.
unicornporn 10y ago
Uhm, what[1]?. It's been available at: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... I know because I've been using those feeds every day for the channels I follow. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_just_dropped_its_support_for_rssatom_feeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_jus...
- talideon 10y ago
  No, that's not the one that YouTube removed that annoyed everyone. You used to be able to get a single feed of the new videos on the channels you're subscribed to. That's not this, and still doesn't exist anymore.
  - jschuur 10y ago
    Are you sure? I just set up a few IFTTT triggers and actions based on YouTube videos with a certain keywords from a couple of channels last week, and those channe specific RSS feeds worked just fine. Edit: OK, I see what you mean. Unified feed across ALL channels you're subscribed to. That's not what I'm using.
    - talideon 10y ago
      Yup, the unified feed is exactly what I'm referring to.
  - zaruvi 10y ago
    Put simply, you're wrong.
    - talideon 10y ago
      OK, then you point me to the unified feed for your subscriptions that YouTube publish. Oh wait, you can't, because there hasn't been one for ages now. They only have per-channel and per-playlist feeds.
  - 10y ago
yxhuvud 10y ago
It makes sense for youtube to have them. Federation is not only for rss readers - there are many applications that can use it as well to push updated content to the users.
andreucs 10y ago
I hope this starts a trend. It has been very frustrating to see large services stop offering RSS feeds, often with no or cumbersome alternatives.
- andreucs 10y ago
  hola
omouse 10y ago
OpenWeb! :D
barnacs 10y ago
Try rss + client of your choice + youtube-dl streaming into the player of your choice. It's like a glimpse into what could have been had we all just sticked to standards.
- oridecon 10y ago
  Another option is using only the browser with a RSS extension, livestreamer.io (tons of options like player-passthrough=hls, player-continuous-http) and https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-with/ It works great for me.
googlya 10y ago
Why was the world suddenly against RSS a few years ago?
- vmateixeira 10y ago
  Short answer: advertisement profit. If you get to have news/articles headlines through RSS you wont bother visiting the actual website unless you it really interests you.
midgetjones 10y ago
Now we just need Google to reinstate Reader!

224 points by sonicrocketman 10y ago

I've been using this feature for a few months, in conjunction with my RSS reader. It's a very nice alternative to YouTube's UI, as I can just pipe my stream of subscriptions to youtube-dl + my preferred native player. Glad to see someone else is doing so!

totalizator 10y ago
++
Solinoid 10y ago
Hello, a bit off topic but what rss reader do you use to pipe?

eip 10y ago

They have always had RSS feeds. Maybe not easy to find but they do work.

webwanderings 10y ago
Agree. I have couple of RSS on few of the search keywords; have been working fine for a while now. Feedly (which I don't use on daily basis) makes it very hard to extract the feed URL. I lost track of how I discovered YouTube RSS links.
kzrdude 10y ago
They broke every RSS feed of channels in the folder I had. I've long deleted the folder now, and I'm unsure why I should trust them to have it work this time.
- eip 10y ago
  Yea a few years ago they changed the format of the urls without redirecting the old urls. Weak sauce.

scottjad 10y ago

I don't think this is anything new. The feature they got rid of was a single RSS feed for all your subscriptions. They've had per channel RSS feeds and OPML export since they got rid of that, I believe.

milankragujevic 10y ago
I agree, they got rid of the single feed for all subscriptions, and that per-channel rss thing has existed for a long time and wasn't removed at all, afaik.
rsoto 10y ago
Yeah, I was confused as well, as I don't follow channels directly on YouTube, but via RSS, and I've been doing that for 5+ years, at least. For the curious, you can add a channel via this URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channelid> And follow a user via: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username>
- ajanuary 10y ago
  I must be misremembering. From what I remember, I used to subscribe the RSS feeds per-channel, but then they all had posts saying this feature was going away, and then they stopped working. Did they just change the URL or something?

hyperanthony 10y ago

I hope this starts a trend. It has been very frustrating to see large services stop offering RSS feeds, often with no or cumbersome alternatives.

helper 10y ago

Interesting. A bunch of my old dead YouTube RSS feeds suddenly had new posts (of old videos) in them this week. They had killed off public rss feeds but you could still get an rss URL if you were singed in and subscribed to the channel.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
They must have changed how it worked for a while. I've been subscribing to YouTube channels without a YouTube account for about a year now. In the "Uploads" section of a channel, there's been a "link" tag to the RSS feed in the markup which most RSS clients will detect, if not, you could copy the link right out of the markup.

iKlsR 10y ago

I've been playing with the idea and have a prototype of a "Youtube Manager" for lack of not having a better name app powered by electron. I have some 300+ subscriptions (yeah I know... but these are curated very interesting channels that upload often) and yt's interface is horrible to keep track of uploads/subscriptions. I don't care for spamming my inbox when someone uploads or push notifications and I tend to miss uploads I look forward to at times. It has several layouts, my most used being a trello/tweetdeck setup with categories and fullscreen/overlayed video, also spent last weekend adding the mobile minimize video feature while able to search. It's been a sideproject for several months now and I find it highly useful but I was wondering if I should take the plunge and develop this into something more. I'm a bit hesitant seeing how youtube killed Streamus (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-with-300000-users/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-...). But since this has popped up, would this be something that people are genuinely interested in and or would it be wise to release into the wild? Edit: There exists http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube but this is way different and does more than just search, not as heavy either thanks to the chromium engine.

SeanAnderson 10y ago
Heh, developer of Streamus here! Found myself reading your comment, prepping to write a response, and then saw you'd already mentioned it! Huzzah! Overall, I wouldn't worry too much about what you're doing. Streamus was terminated because of complaints from record labels. That's not an issue you'd encounter. Just don't make it so good that it suddenly gets re-built in-house! :) The idea itself seems useful enough. I agree that many parts of YouTube's interface could have improved usability. It's difficult to get people to keep YouTube + your website open, but if you can implement enough of their features to warrant only being on your page then I don't see any issues.
- iKlsR 10y ago
  I loved the heck out of that extension was also one of the early people giving feedback waay back, ended up just piping my playlists to youtube-dl via a cron near the end. I do recall reading a back and forth email convo between you and Yt where it seem they just randomly axed it for some opaque reason but thanks for the clarification. Thanks for the reply and tips! Edit: Apparently this is explained in the article I linked above, I just grabbed a random one to link to. I hadn't looked into it other than the imgur email chain.

kyriakos 10y ago

Awesome. YouTube becomes unmanageable if you subscribe to a lot of channels. There's no way to tag or put your channels in thematic groups which can now be fixed with an rss reader.

icanhackit 10y ago

Is it just me or has RSS been a recurring topic for the last few days? Not that I'm complaining, I love RSS, but it's been an oddly popular topic. It leaves me pondering whether publishers are beginning to consider it was a superior format for mass consumption that has been ignored at their own peril. There's just too much content out there and fatigue can quickly set in when hunting for suitable viewing material.

losteric 10y ago
I believe Youtube generates more ad revenue when it's viewed directly on the site, instead of embedded in another website (Facebook). Plus producers know their content gets fairly prioritized by the end user when it's consumed through RSS.

john111 10y ago

>To get an RSS feed of a single channel’s uploads, paste the channel URL into your RSS reader. How does this work? How does the feed-reader know to grab the RSS XML instead of the page HTML, if they have the same URL?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
justinator 10y ago
The RSS reader just looks for the, <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="yourfeed.rss" /> tag(s) in the head of your document. So for example, my channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/leaddadaist https://www.youtube.com/user/leaddadaist Here's the tag in the source, <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCnQRp2dhO1SIp9--CSPmYpQ">
sohkamyung 10y ago
In Firefox, there is an option to customise the toolbar by adding a '(RSS) Subscribe' button to it. This becomes active when Firefox detects that a web page has an accompanying RSS feed. Clicking on it either brings you to the RSS feed directly or give you subscription options if multiple RSS/Atom feeds are found for the web page.
jeffkeeling 10y ago
I know it's not hard to piece the rss feed together yourself, but I made a little tool so all you need to is the youtube channel/playlist url and the feed gets generated: https://jeffkeeling.github.io/youtube_rss_extractor/ https://jeffkeeling.github.io/youtube_rss_extractor/

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I didn't know they were ever turned off. I don't have a Google account but I still want to see YouTube videos in my feed, so I have a script that subscribes to YT RSS feeds and emails them to me, with filters on my mail server to organize them. They've worked fine since I first set them up.

vidyesh 10y ago

This is not new at all. Go to https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager and you can see the export option at the bottom of the page. It was never removed nor disabled.

talideon 10y ago
That was never removed, but the single feed of your subscriptions was. Unfortunately, none of this replaces that.

wingerlang 10y ago

Nice. This makes it so I could see only the videos I care about, for example some channels have multiple "personalities" uploading to it but I care only about one of them. I guess combining this with some filters would be nice.

robotbarber666 10y ago

It used to be possible to get RSS for any YouTube search -- by keyword, not by channel. As far as I know, that's still gone.

leni536 10y ago

They apparently have atom feeds for playlists too, not only channels. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatever> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatev... AFAIK they don't advertise this anywhere.

unicornporn 10y ago

Uhm, what[1]?. It's been available at: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... I know because I've been using those feeds every day for the channels I follow. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_just_dropped_its_support_for_rssatom_feeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_jus...

talideon 10y ago
No, that's not the one that YouTube removed that annoyed everyone. You used to be able to get a single feed of the new videos on the channels you're subscribed to. That's not this, and still doesn't exist anymore.
- jschuur 10y ago
  Are you sure? I just set up a few IFTTT triggers and actions based on YouTube videos with a certain keywords from a couple of channels last week, and those channe specific RSS feeds worked just fine. Edit: OK, I see what you mean. Unified feed across ALL channels you're subscribed to. That's not what I'm using.
  - talideon 10y ago
    Yup, the unified feed is exactly what I'm referring to.
- zaruvi 10y ago
  Put simply, you're wrong.
  - talideon 10y ago
    OK, then you point me to the unified feed for your subscriptions that YouTube publish. Oh wait, you can't, because there hasn't been one for ages now. They only have per-channel and per-playlist feeds.
- 10y ago

yxhuvud 10y ago

It makes sense for youtube to have them. Federation is not only for rss readers - there are many applications that can use it as well to push updated content to the users.

andreucs 10y ago

I hope this starts a trend. It has been very frustrating to see large services stop offering RSS feeds, often with no or cumbersome alternatives.

andreucs 10y ago
hola

omouse 10y ago

OpenWeb! :D

barnacs 10y ago

Try rss + client of your choice + youtube-dl streaming into the player of your choice. It's like a glimpse into what could have been had we all just sticked to standards.

oridecon 10y ago
Another option is using only the browser with a RSS extension, livestreamer.io (tons of options like player-passthrough=hls, player-continuous-http) and https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-with/ It works great for me.

googlya 10y ago

Why was the world suddenly against RSS a few years ago?

vmateixeira 10y ago
Short answer: advertisement profit. If you get to have news/articles headlines through RSS you wont bother visiting the actual website unless you it really interests you.

midgetjones 10y ago

Now we just need Google to reinstate Reader!