Shell Script to get YouTube RSS feed for any channel

Did you know YouTube has RSS feeds? No? Probably because YouTube makes them nearly impossible to find.

A few weeks ago, Thomas Brand posted https://eggfreckles.net/2020/01/03/youtube-rss/ where he explained how to get the RSS feed by looking at the HTML source of a YouTube page.

Of course that’s just the sort of thing that’s ripe for computer to do for you, so I wrote a shell script based on his article:

The gist page also has instructions on how to install / use it.

(Really someone should make a simple web page that does this, but my web programming skills are super weak.)

((Well, actually YouTube ought to just not hide these in the first place, but I don’t expect that to happen.))

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Google says you should just be able to paste a YouTube channel URL into a feed reader. That link also describes how to create a single OPML file to export all one’s subscriptions at once.

But there are websites which will derive RSS feeds for you like fetchrss:

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Aha! I should have guessed someone had already made that.

As for being able to paste in a YouTube URL… I tried adding http://youtube.com/512pixels to Feedbin and it said “No Feed Found”.

Did you try https? I copy/pasted your non-https URL in FetchRSS and it wouldn’t take it, but it did take a https tweak.

Sorry, I mean that I tried to paste the URL into FeedBin, not FetchRSS.

What I meant is, given that fetchRSS wouldn’t accept http, did you try https with feed service?

I’ve been pasting YouTube channel URLs into Inoreader, and most of the time it successfully pulls the RSS for me. I’m going to try Thomas Brand’s trick in future.