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?

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

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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.)

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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.

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.

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…

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

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.

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//  and it’s been working fine.

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

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.  

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

You, my friend are amazing.  Now I just need to add 145 channels.  Do you have a PayPal account I can drop a few bucks into?

Aw, shucks! That’s totally unnecessary, but I wouldn’t want to discourage that kind of spontaneous support for open source devs :stuck_out_tongue: My email is dmack.ca at gmail.

PS, it’s my first time using Heroku and I suppose it’s too late to give the app a nicer URL now. Oh well! “Morning retreat” has a ring to it.

Its great! The only thing I’m missing in the feed is the video duration.

Wow, you are amazing! I’m glad I’m not the only one that uses Youtube via RSS… Keeping track of uploaders and their videos would be such a pain any other way. Glad I didn’t have to make my own app to fix this :stuck_out_tongue:

Guess I’ll start moving my feeds over. Anyone know when Youtube is killing their old API and thus their feeds?

If this was integrated straight in to Newsblur that’d be absolutely fantastic.

Last I heard, April 20th

No point in delaying then… Just moved all my feeds over. Just changed the feed address and re-parsed. Had to manually maintain read/unread state but small price to pay.

@Isgar: I was thinking I’d switch it to use a bigger thumbnail image, but then it occurred to me it would be just as easy to embed the video itself in the feed (or both?), which would show the duration (in a way) and not cost extra API calls… I’ll meditate on this!

Besides the missing runtime you already have way better feed items than youtube itself ever did. They didn’t show the full description and it lacked proper formating.

Glad I spotted this topic, looks like the official Feeds are dead now. You can still get one but it just gives a list filled with the latest video.

Any chance of getting the source to GitHub? I’d like to run my own instance just to make sure it keeps working.

(I’ve got over 100 feeds I’m following from YouTube - or was, until Google thought otherwise…)