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Youtube Channel RSS Feed.

Date published: 2025-01-02T22:56:00+0200

(copied more or less verbatim from https://codeberg.org/kakafarm/guile-youtube-rss/src/branch/master/README.org, (after a org-md-export-as-markdown in GNU Emacs)).

I have written GNU Guile script that outputs the RSS feed of a Youtube channel for each video URL of that channel. You can find it on https://codeberg.org/kakafarm/guile-youtube-rss/.

Why?

If you want to follow Youtube channels using your chosen feed reader, you can:

Get a channel ID, like UC0BvmQ-UWDnDc9seBcSanRA.
Append it at the end of https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=. You get https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC0BvmQ-UWDnDc9seBcSanRA.
Add it to a feed reader of your choosing (which is probably https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed).

What if you do not have the channel ID?

What if you only have the uploader ID, the one prefixed with the strudel sign (@), like in the case of https://www.youtube.com/@SexuaLobster/?

You cannot use it as https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=@SexuaLobster. It gives you a 404 error.

To the best of my knowledge, you cannot use any other variable name instead of channel_id.

I have also tried uploader_id, username, user_name, and user_id, but they all return a 404 error.

What you need is to copy the address to one of the videos of that channel and provide it as input to this wee Guile script.

Usage.

Single URL.

If you have a video URL you would want to convert, you can run:

printf "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqDRA60AgNs" | guile youtube-rss.scm

It will output the following:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC0BvmQ-UWDnDc9seBcSanRA

A file filled with URLs.

If you have a bunch of them in a file called newline-separated-youtube-video-urls.list (yes, they must be newline separated):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1gInUG5uw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdwtMtaIkGM

Run the command:

guile youtube-rss.scm \
    < newline-separated-youtube-video-urls.list \
    >> youtube-channel-rss-feeds.list

You now have a file called youtube-channel-rss-feeds.list filled with RSS feed URLs:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCZ8Ql34vQn91fzq0xvG9Pqg
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCkK9UDm_ZNrq_rIXCz3xCGA

On a Guix shell container.

If you want to run it in a Guix shell container, you would run:

guix shell \
    --container \
    --network \
    curl \
    guile \
    guile-srfi-180 \
    nss-certs \
    yt-dlp \
    -- guile youtube-rss.scm \
    < newline-separated-youtube-video-urls.list \
    >> youtube-channel-rss-feeds.list

Dependencies.

In a Guix installation, these are the packages on which the script depends:

curl.
guile-srfi-180.
guile.
nss-certs.
yt-dlp.

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