Samuel, you are a force of nature!
Yes, this only works for users right now. Checking the database and that’s 99% of youtube.com urls.
!@#$ I already convert my feed to “https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=”. Do I need to covert them back to use this new solution?
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With all due respect Samuel, I brought this up 2 months ago and you provided a wishy-washy response that basically said “if someone else fixes this, I’ll be happy to implement it.” We heard nothing from you in the intervening time and it took the efforts of other users to provide us with piece of mind that we could still use YouTube in a manner convenient to us. I personally took advantage of DMack’s generosity and spent MANY hours moving all of my feeds over to his implementation. Then we came to learn that Google was going to provide their own (crappy) feed if we exported our subscriptions. Not knowing if I was actually subscribed to each of my feeds I went to each channel one at a time to make sure I was subscribed to them and exported my xml file. Now a week after the deprecation you magically appear and say “good news!” you didn’t have to do any of that nonsense! Basically, your communication sucked. I’ve been one of your biggest defenders and have been loyal to NB ever since I found it, but for you to not even pop in to this rather active conversation and say “hey guys, I’m working on this and I think you’re going to really like it when I’m done,” is just pathetic.
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Many older youtube channels are users, but pretty much every channel started in the last two years or so is a channel-channel with the funky ID and no username.
Make Magazine is one of the biggest that isn’t an user: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChtY6O8Ahw2cz05PS2GhUbg
Sorry about not communicating that I was working on this, but to be fair I wasn’t working on this until today, as I was on vacation last week. There’s no need to convert all of your feeds back. If it works then you won’t gain much by switching the URLs back.
To make it easier, all you have to do it add the user URL, which you can get to quite easily. NewsBlur will automatically turn it into the correct feed. Getting the channels lined up in your browser shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, esp. as YouTube provides a handy list of your subscriptions.
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I’ll be fixing channels on Friday, but if you have any examples of URLs that don’t work but should, please let me know. I need to know both the feed URL and the page URL. Obviously I don’t need repeats of patterns, and I honestly only think the channels need some help.
Not arguing Samuel shouldn’t support the newer channel format, but all channels as far as I know are also a user. Switch to any other tab on the channel/user and you’ll get the old user URL format like https://www.youtube.com/user/makemagazine/videos from there you even get the user format url if you switch back to the Home tab…
Actually, the only place that seem to use the channel format for the URLs seem to be the link on video pages, otherwise it seems the link is in the user format (a search for make magazine gives links to the user format URL).
Also, Tazio, when you brought this up you were one of the first to do so. I can’t work on every issue. When this hit critical mass I decided to step in and make a better solution that was automatic. The API died last week while I was on vacation. As soon as I got back I figured out a fix.
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Small problem. Adding a new site works, for example, I add https://www.youtube.com/user/BohemianEagle that creates a new site with no problems (though curiously when I check settings api feed as the feed address). But you can’t change the URL on a site you’ve already added, when I tried changing the feed to the address above and click reparse all feed items disappear and the status of the fetch is “SAX Exception (553)”.
Obviously it’d be nice if I could switch over to your internal solution without having add all my youtube subscriptions as a new sites as some of them have quite a bit of intelligence training on them.
Many of my channels have this format:
The important part is obviously &author=USERNAME
The website URL is unfortunately just youtube.com
I have reimported my feeds with the take-out tool, so they’re in this format:
Feed Address: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCWqr2tH3dPshNhPjV5h1xRw
Website URL: https://www.youtube.com/user/bunnyhopshow
They work, but the new tool seems much better.
Samuel, what if a particular YouTube feed has duplicate items? Is that something you can fix or want to know about?
Seems like the latest fetch of my Youtube subscriptions didn’t work and instead has an error (500) on it.
Feed: https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/lamonshee/newsubscriptionvideos
Website url: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center
I picked up this rss address quite a while ago, so I don’t know if with the api changes that have happened since then there would be a different address structure or something I should/could be using, I haven’t really been following these changes much.
sam, THANK YOU.
hmph, most of the attempts i’ve made to copy/paste channel/user URLs have worked like a charm, but this one doesn’t seem to be working for some reason.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyp1gCHZJU_fGWFf2rtMkCg
since i’m trying your “just use the channel URL” method, i don’t have a corresponding feed URL. but i tried plugging the username into the gdata link format above, and that also failed:
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?max-results=50&alt=rss&orderby=published&author= numberphile2
This is awesome! One thing I noticed, is that the embedded videos don’t have a full screen button. Would you be able to add full screen support to all the embedded videos?
It looks like Google’s export OPML feature for Youtube subscriptions converts everything to the “channel” format.
I say that because I exported my feeds from Youtube when the API switchover happened, and ALL my feeds are now in that channel format. My old feeds are gone.
I hope you can get Newsblur’s new Youtube features working with those “channel” feeds because I can’t bring myself to try and convert my 50 or so Youtube feeds manually.
Lame news for those of us using the feed generator I posted above! Heroku is messing up its free hosting tier so we may have to change our URLs again if this app stops working. The good news is it’ll probably end up next to my limited twitter-rss app, and a brand new vine-rss app, if such a thing doesn’t exist yet. We can use the “issues” section on the github repo to discuss its fate.
How much is the non-free heroku hosting tier?