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RSS is still only sane way to subscribe to youtube channel, or rather only way that YT managed to not break over the years

by ilyt 3y ago

ttepasse 3y ago
Unfortunately Youtube pushes shorts into the channels feed, presumably because shorts are normal videos under the hood. For a time shorts had the string "#shorts" in their titles which was great for filtering those out but then youtubers started using custom tags. And filtering for "#" seems too risky. I recently found out that my feedreader, Feedbin, allows a media_duration field in their search/action syntax. Now I’m using that experimentally for filtering. Sidenote: Interestingly enough Youtube’s feeds don’t expose duration. Those feeds are ancient, apparently untouched for 15 years. The <media:content> element still advertises its videos as application/x-shockwave-flash. Feedbin, according to its code on Github, does some custom extraction of the duration from the Website for its data model. (Googlers who may read this: Please, for the love of god, don’t change anything. A crappy feed is still better than no feed at all.)
begriffs 3y ago
Oh yeah, gotta love the secret feed link. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$FOO I follow a number of channels this way. I'm grateful and sort of surprised YouTube hasn't killed it off.
- rollcat 3y ago
  You don't need the "secret" feed link. You can visit a channel's page directly, and copy the normal URL straight into your feed reader. It will do the right thing - thanks to the <link> tag, which YouTube advertises in the page source - as recommended by TFA. Your feed reader already knows what to do ;)
  - begriffs 3y ago
    Interesting, maybe it depends on the reader. I tried a channel just now in newsboat and it wasn't smart enough to find the feed, even though I see the page contains <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="...">
    - dannymi 3y ago
      It's in the body--but it's supposed to be in the head.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      I use / have used: NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS), RSSGuard, Miniflux, TheOldReader.com, TinyTinyRSS, and some others I forgot about; I don't think I've seen one that doesn't support this feature. Perhaps you should open a bug / support request?

RSS is still only sane way to subscribe to youtube channel, or rather only way that YT managed to not break over the years

by ilyt 3y ago

RSS is still only sane way to subscribe to youtube channel, or rather only way that YT managed to not break over the years

ttepasse 3y ago

Unfortunately Youtube pushes shorts into the channels feed, presumably because shorts are normal videos under the hood. For a time shorts had the string "#shorts" in their titles which was great for filtering those out but then youtubers started using custom tags. And filtering for "#" seems too risky. I recently found out that my feedreader, Feedbin, allows a media_duration field in their search/action syntax. Now I’m using that experimentally for filtering. Sidenote: Interestingly enough Youtube’s feeds don’t expose duration. Those feeds are ancient, apparently untouched for 15 years. The <media:content> element still advertises its videos as application/x-shockwave-flash. Feedbin, according to its code on Github, does some custom extraction of the duration from the Website for its data model. (Googlers who may read this: Please, for the love of god, don’t change anything. A crappy feed is still better than no feed at all.)

begriffs 3y ago

Oh yeah, gotta love the secret feed link. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$FOO I follow a number of channels this way. I'm grateful and sort of surprised YouTube hasn't killed it off.

rollcat 3y ago
You don't need the "secret" feed link. You can visit a channel's page directly, and copy the normal URL straight into your feed reader. It will do the right thing - thanks to the <link> tag, which YouTube advertises in the page source - as recommended by TFA. Your feed reader already knows what to do ;)
- begriffs 3y ago
  Interesting, maybe it depends on the reader. I tried a channel just now in newsboat and it wasn't smart enough to find the feed, even though I see the page contains <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="...">
  - dannymi 3y ago
    It's in the body--but it's supposed to be in the head.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    I use / have used: NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS), RSSGuard, Miniflux, TheOldReader.com, TinyTinyRSS, and some others I forgot about; I don't think I've seen one that doesn't support this feature. Perhaps you should open a bug / support request?