[EN] My YouTube subscriptions as an RSS feed
The Problem
I’m sure you’ve been in the same situation before: you go on YouTube because you want to watch a video, maybe two, from your subscriptions. You open the first one. Oh great, an unskippable fifteen seconds ad. And another one! OK, the video starts. It gets cut a couple of times by other ads of varying length. Oh but what’s this? This recommended video looks nice! And before you know it, your whole afternoon and evening went by painfully watching videos on YouTube’s atrocious video player. You lost focus.
My Solution: mpv + RSS
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were possible to watch these videos with a full-fledged video player over which you have complete control? Which could be customized to your heart’s content? Which won’t secretly track what you watch?
Oh right, mpv! It supports most video formats you can think of, and thanks to its interoperability with youtube-dl, you can also watch videos from an extremely wide variety of websites! So why not YouTube?
Now, the question is how to get rid of YouTube’s interface. The answer is actually quite simple: let’s use an RSS feed. With the RSS feeds from YouTube, you will receive in your RSS reader the link of the video with its thumbnail and its description. You can then copy from there the link and open it with mpv with a command like this:
mpv "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xym2R6_Qd7c"
Channel RSS
Now the question is how to get the RSS feed of a channel? The answer
is quite simple. The base URL for a YouTube channel RSS feed is
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= to which you
simply have to add the channel ID. For instance, if you want to follow
Tom Scott with this, you simply have to extract the part of the
channel after /channel/ in his URL and append it to the URL mentioned
above, and TADAH! you get an RSS feed to his channel!
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCBa659QWEk1AI4Tg--mrJ2A
Be careful to select the channel ID only if it is after a /channel/
though! The part that is after a /c/ will not work. If you end up on
the URL https://www.youtube.com/c/TomScottGo, simply click on a random
video, then click on the channel’s name. This should bring you back to
the channel but with an important difference: the URL is now
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBa659QWEk1AI4Tg--mrJ2A.
The thing that is really nice with this setup is you don’t really need to actually subscribe to a channel, your RSS feed already does that for you! And with lots of RSS feed readers, you can categorize your different feeds, meaning you can even categorize your subscriptions!
Playlist RSS
It is also possible to follow not only a channel but a playlist of
videos. For that, you will instead use
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= as your base URL
to which you will add the ID of the playlist you want to follow. For
instance, with Tom Scott’s playlist for Citation Needed Season 7, the
URL of the playlist is
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG,
which means you need to keep the PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG
and put it into the URL like so:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG
Which RSS reader to go with?
If you know me, you’ll know I am extremely biased towards Emacs, so of
course I’ll recommend Elfeed to any Emacs user (my relevant
configuration is here). I even wrote an advice around
elfeed-show-visit to ensure YouTube videos are open with mpv instead
of my web browser.
If you’re not into Emacs, or not that into Emacs, you can also try
other alternatives such as NewsFlash, a very nice RSS reader written
in GTK for Linux –I may not always agree with DistroTube, but he made
a very nice video presenting this piece of software. (Remember,
right-click and then mpv "the url here"!)
The News app for Nextcloud is also very neat, I recommend you using it.
You can also get your RSS feed in your terminal with Newsboat. Not really my cup of tea, but I can see why some people enjoy it.
Improving a bit the mpv tooling
You might have heard it, but youtube-dl hasn’t been doing great recently. The tool is becoming slow, and it lacks quite a few features it could really benefit from. While it is important to acknowledge its historical importance, I think it is now time to move on, and its successor shall be yt-dlp. In my experience, this youtube-dl fork is much faster than youtube-dl itself on top of providing additional features such as SponsorBlock integration.
How do you replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp then? If you use Arch Linux
or one of its derivates (I hope not Manjaro though), you can simply
install yt-dlp-drop-in from the AUR.
paru -S yt-dlp-drop-in
# or if you prefer yay
yay -S yt-dlp-drop-in
# or whichever AUR helper you prefer, as long as it is NOT yaourt
If you are not an Arch Linux user, check out this article, it will help you.