Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Subscribing to YouTube channels using RSS

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Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/110
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed. When I wrote this post, I was only 20 years old!

Although I unsubscribed from all YouTube channels and removed the app from my phone, I now try to consume videos in a more controlled way. I now subscribe to channels using my feed reader Miniflux.

It seems like each YouTube channel has a channel ID, consisting of a random string, and an optional username. I found the following methods to work to subscribe to a channel:

  1. If the YouTube channel has a custom username (the URL of the channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/ + username), go to the videos tab, copy the URL and paste it into Miniflux’s “Add subscription” page. It will find the correct feed.
  2. If the URL of the channel is like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/ + random string (the channel ID). Copy the channel ID and paste https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= + channel ID into the “Add subscription” page.

Subscribing to YouTube channels this way allows me to subscribe to new videos, but Miniflux shows them between all the other news I subscribe too. Because the YouTube feed contains an embedded player, I can watch videos without looking at comments or video recommendations, decreasing the distraction. And I can bookmark videos to watch them later. I group all YouTube subscriptions into a category.

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Jan-Lukas Else
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