New article: YouTube and RSS feeds
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@ -1654,3 +1654,116 @@ haut et d’ouvrir une issue sur Github sur le [[https://github.com/Phundrak/tut
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** [EN] My YouTube subscriptions as an RSS feed :linux:dev:tutorial:
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:PROPERTIES:
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:EXPORT_FILE_NAME: youtube-subscriptions-rss
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:EXPORT_DATE: 2022-02-04
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:export_hugo_menu: :menu "main"
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:END:
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*** The Problem
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I’m sure you’ve been in the same situation before: you go on YouTube
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because you want to watch a video, maybe two, from your subscriptions.
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You open the first one. Oh great, an unskippable fifteen seconds ad.
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And another one! OK, the video starts. It gets cut a couple of times
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by other ads of varying length. Oh but what’s this? This recommended
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video looks nice! And before you know it, your whole afternoon and
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evening went by painfully watching videos on YouTube’s atrocious video
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player. You lost focus.
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*** My Solution: mpv + RSS
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Wouldn’t it be nice if it were possible to watch these videos with a
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full fledged video player over which you have complete control? Which
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could be customized to your heart’s content? Which won’t secretly
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track what you watch?
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Oh right, [[https://mpv.io/][mpv]]! It supports most video formats you can think of, and
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thanks to its interoperability with [[https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl][youtube-dl]], you can also watch
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videos from [[https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html][an extremely wide variety of websites]]! So why not YouTube?
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Now, the question is how to get rid of YouTube’s interface. The answer
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is actually quite simple: let’s use an RSS feed. With the RSS feeds
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from YouTube, you will receive in your RSS reader the link of the
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video with its thumbnail and its description. You can then copy from
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there the link and open it with mpv with a command like this:
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#+begin_src bash
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mpv "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xym2R6_Qd7c"
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#+end_src
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**** Channel RSS
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Now the question is how to get the RSS feed of a channel? The answer
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is quite simple. The base URL for a YouTube channel RSS feed is
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~https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=~ to which you
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simply have to add the channel ID. For instance, if you want to follow
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Tom Scott with this, you simply have to extract the part of the
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channel after ~/channel/~ in his URL and append it to the URL mentioned
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above, and TADAH! you get an RSS feed to his channel!
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#+begin_src text
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https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCBa659QWEk1AI4Tg--mrJ2A
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#+end_src
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Be careful to select the channel ID only if it is after a ~/channel/~
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though! The part that is after a ~/c/~ will not work. If you end up on
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the URL ~https://www.youtube.com/c/TomScottGo~, simply click on a random
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video, then click on the channel’s name. This should bring you back to
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the channel but with an important difference: the URL is now
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~https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBa659QWEk1AI4Tg--mrJ2A~.
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The thing that is really nice with this setup is you don’t really need
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to actually subscribe to a channel, your RSS feed already does that
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for you! And with lots of RSS feed readers, you can categorize your
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different feeds, meaning you can even categorize your subscriptions!
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**** Playlist RSS
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It is also possible to follow not only a channel but a playlist of
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videos. For that, you will instead use
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~https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=~ as your base URL
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to which you will add the ID of the playlist you want to follow. For
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instance, with Tom Scott’s playlist for Citation Needed Season 7, the
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URL of the playlist is
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~https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG~,
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which means you need to keep the ~PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG~
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and put it into the URL like so:
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#+begin_src text
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https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL96C35uN7xGI15-QbtUD-wJ5-G8oBI-tG
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#+end_src
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*** Which RSS reader to go with?
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If you know me, you’ll know I am extremely biaised towards Emacs, so
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of course I’ll recommend Elfeed to any Emacs user ([[https://config.phundrak.com/emacs#Packages-Configuration-Applications-Elfeedoip0fl6184j0][my relevant
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configuration is here]]). I even wrote an advice around
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~elfeed-show-visit~ to ensure YouTube videos are open with mpv instead
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of my web browser.
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If you’re not into Emacs, or not /that/ into Emacs, you can also try
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other alternatives such as [[https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk][NewsFlash]], a very nice RSS reader written
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in GTK for Linux –I may not always agree with DistroTube, but he made
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a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBAmviddh4A][very nice video]] presenting this piece of software. (Remember,
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right-click and then ~mpv "the url here"~!)
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The [[https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news][News app]] for Nextcloud is also very neat, I recommend you using it.
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You can also get your RSS feed in your terminal with [[https://newsboat.org/][Newsboat]]. Not
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really my cup of tea, but I can see why some people enjoy it.
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*** Improving a bit the mpv tooling
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You might have heard it, but youtube-dl hasn’t been doing great
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recently. The tool is becoming slow and it lacks quite a few features
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it could really benefit from. While it is important to acknowledge its
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historical importance, I think it is now time to move on, and its
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successor shall be [[https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp][yt-dlp]]. In my experience, this youtube-dl fork is
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much faster than youtube-dl itself on top of providing additional
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features such as [[https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#sponsorblock-options][SponsorBlock integration]].
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How do you replace youtube-dl with yt-dlp then? If you use ArchLinux
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or one of its derivates (I hope not Manjaro though), you can simply
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install ~yt-dlp-drop-in~ from the AUR.
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#+begin_src bash
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paru -S yt-dlp-drop-in
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# or if you prefer yay
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yay -S yt-dlp-drop-in
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# or whichever AUR helper you prefer, as long as it is NOT yaourt
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#+end_src
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If you are not an ArchLinux user, check out [[https://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/replace-youtube-dl-with-yt-dlp-how-to-make-mpv-work-with-yt-dlp][this article]], it will help
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you.
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