
YouTube has apparently reinstated RSS feeds - sonicrocketman
https://brianschrader.com/archive/youtube-has-apparently-reinstated-rss-feeds/
======
iKlsR
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-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-an-
extension-with-300000-users/)). 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
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.

~~~
milankragujevic
Hey, Hi! Haven't had the time to try Streamus when it was still active, but
kudos on the extension!

I was wondering, how stupid would it be to bundle youtube-dl with a
NWJS/Electron app and make a user accept an EULA where you have a disclaimer
that you're not responsible for anything, and have the app function like
Spotify but using youtube-dl to fetch the DASH m4a/opus audio files off of
YouTube and play them, thereby removing ads and minimizing data usage...

I am in the process of making such an app, but not a lawyer, so not sure how
well it'd go... It would be open source...

~~~
grabeh
You can put in place all the contractual provisions you want with the user but
your relationship with the user is irrelevant. It is your relationship with
the host/owner of the content that matters.

Streamus attracted Google's ire because it bypassed ads and separated out
audio and visual content. Both of these attributes look to be features of your
proposed app. On that basis it is likely to attract Google's attention.

Having said that, it's likely that they wouldn't bother pursuing you until
your app became popular, as was the case with Streamus...

~~~
SeanAnderson
Sorry, just to clarify -- Streamus did not bypass ads. The minimum allowed
video player is 200px * 200px, their ad network doesn't run on that small of a
player because advertisers were unwilling to pay to have their ad shown that
small. I was initially accused of this by their legal department, but if you
read through the entire e-mail chain, you'll see they eventually relent and
admit that advertisements are not an issue.

Additionally, I did patch in support for video content (and wrote a huge post
on the tech. challenges of it: [https://medium.com/@MeoMix/beautifully-
buffered-bytes-ff798e...](https://medium.com/@MeoMix/beautifully-buffered-
bytes-ff798eca58a)), but that proved insufficient.

YouTube took the view point that Chrome extensions should function similar to
mobile apps not like browser tabs. They indicated they wanted the music paused
whenever the main UI window minimized. I argued that would be like pausing
YouTube when you click between tabs. They disagreed and terminated my API
access.

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unicornporn
Uhm, what[1]?. It's been available at:

[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID)

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_jus...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_just_dropped_its_support_for_rssatom_feeds/)

~~~
talideon
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.

~~~
jasonkostempski
Isn't that basically double subscribing to channels? The "viewed" indicators
would be out of sync, why would you want to do that?

~~~
kzrdude
Imagine if you didn't have a youtube account and were using RSS feeds for
particular channels. Would anyone do that if it were possible? Surely not!
Nobody would prefer RSS feeds per channel that they were interested in,
integrated into their existing feed reader.

~~~
jasonkostempski
What? It is possible, and it's exactly how I've been using YouTube for about a
year. I don't have a YouTube account, I add the "Uploads" feed for each
channel I'm interested in to my reader.

~~~
talideon
Then you're not actually subscribed to any channel, and you don't show up as a
subscriber in their analytics.

~~~
jasonkostempski
That's one of the main reasons I use it that way. Aside from that, it's been a
better experience than subscribing in YouTube, when I did that, there'd be a
number next to the channels but I could never decipher exactly what it meant,
it certainly wasn't just new uploads.

~~~
talideon
Then why did you make the remark about 'double subscribing'?

Also, there's a good reason for subscribing to channels: it actually help the
channel creator because the subscriber number (which is what that number is)
feeds into their algorithms regarding reach.

------
scottjad
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.

~~~
rsoto
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
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?

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icanhackit
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
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.

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helper
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
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.

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Sir_Cmpwn
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.

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hyperanthony
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.

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barnacs
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
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.

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leni536
They apparently have atom feeds for playlists too, not only channels.

[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatev...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<whatever>)

AFAIK they don't advertise this anywhere.

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

~~~
kzrdude
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
Yea a few years ago they changed the format of the urls without redirecting
the old urls. Weak sauce.

------
vidyesh
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
That was never removed, but the single feed of your subscriptions was.
Unfortunately, none of this replaces that.

------
woodruffw
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!

~~~
Solinoid
Hello, a bit off topic but what rss reader do you use to pipe?

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

~~~
vmateixeira
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.

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kyriakos
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.

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andreucs
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
hola

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robotbarber666
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.

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wingerlang
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.

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john111
>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?

~~~
justinator
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">

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yxhuvud
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.

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midgetjones
Now we just need Google to reinstate Reader!

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omouse
OpenWeb! :D

