YouTube eliminating support for RSS/Atom

YouTube is depricating their API v2 and the replacement, v3, does not
support RSS. I follow about 100 different channels through NewsBlur and really don't want to be forced to use whatever interface Google decides is best for me this week. Does anyone have a solution lined up?

Tazio

18 Posts
2 Reply Likes
pissed at Google

Posted 2 months ago

2 months ago

Will Reichard

14 Posts
4 Reply Likes

Sad that Google is leading the way with moves like these. A free and open web...yeah.

Comment

2 months ago

Kazriko Redclaw

11 Posts
6 Reply Likes

I'm tempted to stop watching youtube videos entirely if they cut that off. Or at least only watch ones that have RSS feeds available elsewhere. (Like Reason.TV, they often feature their videos inside of their normal RSS feeds. All of EEVBlog's videos have another RSS feed too.)

Comment

1 person likes this

2 months ago

DMack

42 Posts
18 Reply Likes

It looks like it should be fairly easy* to make something that takes their JSON output and spits out RSS. It took me like 15 minutes to find the name of the function we need to use just to get somebody's videos, so that's a bad sign, lol.

*Oh, I see there's a rate limit on how often you can call the API. So it will be a pain in the butt but still pretty easy then.

Comment

2 months ago

Samuel Clay, Official Rep

5250 Posts
1171 Reply Likes

I personally subscribe to EEVBlog's YouTube RSS, but I think Dave has an alternate feed. Otherwise, if anybody has an easy YouTube -> RSS app, I'd be happy to automatically integrate it.

Comment

2015-03-10T02:59:26+00:00

Kazriko Redclaw

11 Posts
6 Reply Likes

Yep, I subscribe to his alternate feed. It actually has a bit more info and the youtube is embedded right in his page.

2015-04-21T19:31:16+00:00

Timo_CG

1 Post
2 Reply Likes

It would be great if you could automatically upgrade the urls.
I've found the new URLs here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_just_dropped_its_support_for_rssatom_feeds/

For example,
I'm manually changing these type of URLS:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/CRASHCOURSE/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&...
OR
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/CRASHCOURSE/uploads
OR
youtube.com/rss/user/CRASHCOURSE

to this:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=CRASHCOURSE
(Note: the CRASHCOURSE is the example channel name in this case)

Another type of URL is for when the channel id is used instead of the channel name.
For example this one from handmade hero ( Channel ID: UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA )
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA/uploads
has to be changed to:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA

Again, it would be great if this could be done automatically. (Without losing the unread items.)

2015-04-22T08:54:48+00:00

Shrike

11 Posts
1 Reply Like

+1 on the automatic upgrade. I've got over 300 youtube feeds I'm following, most of them releasing stuff maybe once or twice a year. Going through each of them through settings and copy/pasting the channel name to notepad is getting a bit tedious...

Even the crappy new-style official feed would be better than 300 feeds saying "Uploads by Youtube Help" :D

2015-04-22T13:08:17+00:00

Tazio

18 Posts
2 Reply Likes

Just download your OPML file, open in Word, delete the non-YouTube stuff, find and replace to swap out the formatting, then re-upload the file.

2 months ago

Tazio

18 Posts
2 Reply Likes

I'm not a programmer, so this is over my head, but will this code do anything https://github.com/ali1234/ytsubs It sounds like one of the problems with v3 is that you will be limited in the number of API calls per day. Even if I only get me feeds pulled once every day or two, that's better than them not updating at all. Google crossed the Don't Be Evil bridge a long time ago...

Comment

2015-03-11T04:14:19+00:00

tedder42

135 Posts
9 Reply Likes

that works well- I whipped up a version to pull my subscribed video feed, also sent a pull request back to the author for some minor changes.

2 months ago

g3styx

17 Posts
0 Reply Likes

This may be similar to what Stephen posted, but I use this to fetch videos from my YouTube account: http://youtube-rss.f-y.name/user/<username>/ and it's been working fine.

More details are on the actual page: http://youtube-rss.f-y.name/

Comment

2 months ago

Tazio

18 Posts
2 Reply Likes

From the links on your page it looks like you are making calls to the v2 API. From what I understand that will stop working next month.

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1 month ago

g3styx

17 Posts
0 Reply Likes

Ah, whoops. My apologies. Sorry for the spam.

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2 weeks ago

DMack

42 Posts
18 Reply Likes

I put this together, alarmingly quickly:
https://morning-retreat-1911.herokuapp.com/
It seems to be working well with this feed:
https://morning-retreat-1911.herokuapp.com/feed/playlist.php?id=UU0iwHRFpv2_fpojZgQhElEQ

I'll put it up on github shortly if anybody wants. I think I get 50 million API points per day, so it should always be enough, especially if Newsblur respects the channel TTL tag.

Lemme know what you think, feel free to start using it at that URL unless somebody has a better idea!

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8 people like this

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2015-04-20T18:55:09+00:00

Tazio

15 Posts
1 Reply Like

Thanks again DMack. Just finished transferring all my feeds over to morning-retreat. I could see the feeds dying one by one as I was finishing up the transition. For those not following this thread they may be in for quite a surprise today.

If you have taken advantage of DMack's generosity, please consider thanking him or dropping a few buck in his PayPal account.

2015-04-20T19:43:35+00:00

Job van der Zwan

8 Posts
0 Reply Likes

Seriously DMack, add a donate button :)

2015-04-20T20:07:11+00:00

Tazio

15 Posts
1 Reply Like

dmack.ca at gmail

2015-04-21T01:59:03+00:00

DMack

42 Posts
18 Reply Likes

I'm glad you're all finding it useful! I put my code up on Github here; https://github.com/dmackca/youtube-v3-rss

Cheers

2015-04-23T08:04:53+00:00

J. Quintanilla

11 Posts
0 Reply Likes

Amazing work mate :) thanks for the share.

7 days ago

owlness

1 Post
0 Reply Likes

A link to this page has started showing up as an item in several GData-based YouTube feeds:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6098135

Under the RSS reader option is a link from which an OPML file of your subscriptions may be downloaded:

http://youtube.com/subscription_manager?action_takeout=1

The feed URLs all follow the pattern of:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

These same URLs are also being linked to from channel pages.

Unlike the GData feeds, the items in these are just the text description without thumbnails or duration. The available items do appear current from what I have seen thus far, however.

Comment

2015-04-21T02:10:35+00:00

Tazio

13 Posts
0 Reply Likes

Gee, thanks Google for telling all of this ahead of time. I'm still going to use DMack's solution because I don't think he's going to change it on a whim when he gets cranky.

7 days ago

denubisx

13 Posts
1 Reply Like

Thanks owlness.

Here's some xsl that I wrote to reformat the subscription manager takeout ... ompl into something that can be copied and pasted for channels subscribed to in youtube.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; version="1.0">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="*[contains(@xmlUrl, 'youtube.com')]">
* <xsl:value-of select="@xmlUrl"/> - <xsl:value-of select="@title"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

After recovering (subscribing to) almost all the sites that I was following but not subscribed to, I then used the ompl exporter *again* from youtube, and then newsblur's ompl *importer* to just redo my youtube folder.

And now all the channels are regenerated, so all I have to do is fiddle my training and ... status quo ante.

Comment

7 days ago

DMack

42 Posts
18 Reply Likes

Well, dang! That's news to me. Oh well, I like mine better for its descriptions and thumbnails :)

Comment

2015-04-21T02:12:11+00:00

Tazio

15 Posts
1 Reply Like

News to all of us. I've been lurking the YT APIv3 thread for a while and no one from Google said a thing until today. I'm still planning on taking advantage of your hosting if you don't mind.

2015-04-22T07:22:02+00:00

Hampus

139 Posts
19 Reply Likes

I like yours better too, the new official ones only contain a link and an incorrect date... What a mess. So I hope you'' keeps yours up even though there are in fact new official feeds.

2015-04-23T02:58:10+00:00

DMack

42 Posts
18 Reply Likes

Everyone's welcome to use it! I'll be using it too, so I'll notice if it ever breaks :P

4 days ago

Isgar

32 Posts
4 Reply Likes

Right now the gdata feeds are still working and I am too lazy to change them. Does anybody know for how long?

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2015-04-23T12:04:53+00:00

Hampus

141 Posts
19 Reply Likes

Last I heard they were already killed. They won't give any new items, the only item showing in the old feeds now is a link to http://youtube.com/devicesupport

2015-04-23T12:12:50+00:00

Isgar

32 Posts
4 Reply Likes

Well it showed up, but normal videos continued after that.

2015-04-23T12:19:48+00:00

Hampus

141 Posts
19 Reply Likes

Huh, OK then. Well, what they've said is "we’ll begin shutting down the old version on April 20, 2015" so they'll probably stop working sooner rather than later.

There are some tips in this topic on how to quickly change your feed addresses even if you have a lot of them.

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