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For anyone who wants a lo-fi solution to subscribing to a youtube channel without having to deal with the youtube.com website, every channel has a built-in Atom

For anyone who wants a lo-fi solution to subscribing to a youtube channel without having to deal with the youtube.com website, every channel has a built-in Atom feed that contains an entry for each video. My pipeline for watching subscribed channels is to just run a feed reader in one terminal (newsboat) and then copy-paste new videos from that into an adjacent terminal running a loop that runs `yt-dlp` on each pasted line. You can find the feed URL by inspecting the HTML of the youtube.com/channel/.../videos page and searching for "rssUrl"; it'll look like `www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...` Downside: this feed will contain premieres, shorts and livestreams in addition to videos and AFAIK there's no way to filter those out. Depending on the channel, the title might make it obvious whether it's one of those.

harryvederci 2y ago
You can use yt-dlp to get: - the channel id by youtube channel url - the duration + aspect ratio (<= 3 min + vertical = short) - whether or not it's a live / future video
- Arnavion 2y ago
  Yes, I do do that. I meant that there's no way to filter them out of the feed directly, eg via some URL query parameters.
  - voitsykh 2y ago
    https://youtube.com/@handle/videos https://youtube.com/@handle/videos Handle is usually channel name without spaces, and is displayed under it on the website. So for Louis Rossmann that would be: https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos
DavideNL 2y ago
Fyi, an automated alternative: https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub
- ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago
  This looks like a great way to allow the kids to watch a “locked down” Version of YouTube. I want a way to limit what my kids watch on there by locking them down to certain channels.
  - DavideNL 2y ago
    Yea, it's been working great for me. And you can even use SponsorBlock... Setup was quite a bit of work though, so you need _some_ technical knowledge.

harryvederci 2y ago

You can use yt-dlp to get: - the channel id by youtube channel url - the duration + aspect ratio (<= 3 min + vertical = short) - whether or not it's a live / future video

Arnavion 2y ago
Yes, I do do that. I meant that there's no way to filter them out of the feed directly, eg via some URL query parameters.
- voitsykh 2y ago
  https://youtube.com/@handle/videos https://youtube.com/@handle/videos Handle is usually channel name without spaces, and is displayed under it on the website. So for Louis Rossmann that would be: https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos

DavideNL 2y ago

Fyi, an automated alternative: https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub

ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago
This looks like a great way to allow the kids to watch a “locked down” Version of YouTube. I want a way to limit what my kids watch on there by locking them down to certain channels.
- DavideNL 2y ago
  Yea, it's been working great for me. And you can even use SponsorBlock... Setup was quite a bit of work though, so you need _some_ technical knowledge.