YouTube has never offered too many feeds and they were usually difficult to find.
The new YouTube API changed that, but the feeds are still inaccessible from the interface. This why I decided to compile a list of the most useful YouTube feeds you may want to add in your favorite feed reader:
1. Search feeds
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=mapreduce(replace
mapreduce with your query)
2. Search in a category
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/Film/?vq=michel%20gondry&orderby=updated(
Film is the category, while
michel gondry is the query - you need to replace the space with %20. Other categories: Music, Comedy, News, Sports, Autos, Howto.)
3. The latest videos from a channel
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/radiohead/uploads?orderby=updated(replace
radiohead with your channel)
...or only the videos that match your keywords:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/radiohead/uploads?orderby=updated&vq=jigsaw4. Feeds for favorite videos
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/lonelygirl15/favorites?orderby=updated(replace
lonelygirl15's favorite videos)
5. Your subscriptions
This is not a feed that comes directly from YouTube, it's
a Yahoo Pipe.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?YouTubeUsername=google&
_id=28303b479f11e24199be4cafced31ad9&_render=rss&itemLimit=20(concatenate the two lines and replace
google with your username)
The feed above shows the latest videos from the first 25 subscriptions. For those who have more subscriptions, I created
a new version of the pipe that shows the videos from up to 500 subscriptions:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?YouTubeUsername=MotherTalking&
_id=58e4f59f9e5e3282aaffdcbaf05ba68d&_render=rss&itemLimit=50(concatenate the two lines and replace
MotherTalking with your username)
6. Playlists
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/50653251EDB4E764(the code in italic can be obtained from the playlists's URL (e.g.:
Eric Speaks)
Labels: Tips, Yahoo Pipes, YouTube
I have several subscriptions in my YouTube account. Is there a feed so I can follow the subscriptions (I mean all videos from
this page)? Thanks in advance.
daniel said on January 6, 2008 11:41 AM PDT:
sweet, this is awesome! I've wanted to be able to do this for a while
said on January 6, 2008 12:57 PM PDT:
is there a way to see top rated, top viewed via RSS also? thanks!
Cool, I emailed YouTube a while ago asking them to provide RSS feeds for users' favourites; great to find out that it is possible. Useful post, thanks.
Update: I added Radu's suggestion.
Thanks for posting this. I was thinking of an application idea which would use some of these, and I remember them being a little hard to find.
t2t2 said on January 7, 2008 5:00 AM PDT:
YouTube has some
RSS Feeds now (link or click rss button in your web browser when on YouTube)
@t2t2:
That's not quite accurate. They have those feeds for a long time, but they're not very interesting. That page shows links to feeds for:
- tags
- users (channels)
- recently added
- recently featured
- top favorites
- top rated
- most viewed
- most discussed
No feed for search results, for your subscriptions etc.
I've tried some of these feeds and they don't have the video embedded. Google reader doesn't pick it up anyway. The Tversity feed reader doesn't recognize the urls at all, probably because there is no video.
sputnik said on January 14, 2008 2:36 AM PDT:
Thanks for the tips! although I've encountered some problems.. I've tried adding "my subscriptions" feed into my Google reader, and it worked fine, until I've added new subscriptions.. from some reason it dosent update automatically when i refresh. little help? :(
You can't control how fast your feeds are updated in Google Reader. The Refresh link has a different purpose: query the server to see if there are new items that are already crawled.
Probably nobody else subscribes to your feed of YouTube subscriptions, so the feed will be updated every 3 hours or so.
sputnik said on January 14, 2008 4:02 AM PDT:
thanks! it worked..
i guess good things come to those who wait..
krafty said on January 19, 2008 3:23 PM PDT:
I have more than 20 YouTube subscriptions and I think the Yahoo Pipes only gives the latest videos of the first 20 subscriptions, can anyone confirm that and if so, is it possible to generate a RSS link with the videos of the other subscriptions (20+) as well, thanks
OK, I updated the post with a better pipe that shows the videos from the first 500 subscriptions. It should be enough for most people, I hope.
said on January 29, 2008 12:41 PM PDT:
ooooooooooooo, thank you thank you thank you! I was ripping my hair out trying to match just those items that have a certain key word inside the category node, which somehow wasn't working. You totally made my week! smooch.
Dan said on February 14, 2008 6:59 PM PDT:
Thanks for posting this. I've always wanted a way to turn my favorite YouTube videos into a feed and now I can!
Brett said on March 10, 2008 11:15 PM PDT:
Thanks for the info, very handy.
Hmm trying to track down an RSS feed for any "Custom Players" that get created for a particular user... any visibility from anyone else?
said on March 26, 2008 10:12 AM PDT:
Thank you so much... I went through the Yahoo!Pipe source and learnt a lot in the process. I may be wrong, but I believe that for each Subscription you grab only the first 20 items. Is that correct? Is there a way of getting all the items for each subscription?
Beautiful! You posted exactly what I needed. I went through the cumbersome task of trying to add the address of each Youtube subscription I wanted individually into my RSS reader. I gave up about halfway through. Good thing I came upon this. Thanks for the help!
said on June 26, 2008 11:27 AM PDT:
Is there a way just to view all (not the standard 25) of a my subscriptions. Not the actual videos but just the usernames.
said on June 28, 2008 4:07 AM PDT:
I am trying to view my personal youtube channel on my blog. But, when I enter my channel name, no video appears. I don't want to embed my videos though, I want to use the channel view that's available. Anyone know how to resolve this?
Is there a way to get a feed that links directly to the .swf files?
If I go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf1hu6GLmf0
I can get:
http://www.youtube.com/v/yf1hu6GLmf0&hl=en&fs=1
from the embed, and turn it into:
http://www.youtube.com/v/yf1hu6GLmf0&hl=en&fs=1.swf
which redirects to:
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=yf1hu6GLmf0&rel=1&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//i.ytimg.com/vi/yf1hu6GLmf0/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskL1e-r8N4Dl0Lk437pS84zG&iv_storage_server=http://www.google.com/reviews/y/&fs=1&hl=en
Question is: is there any way that I can get to this directly in a feed?
cyneuron said on August 20, 2008 2:08 PM PDT:
awesome post...thanks for help...
metric152 said on September 21, 2008 1:15 AM PDT:
I wrote a script that will turn your favorites or profile into a rss feed. The problem with the feed youtube gives is it won't return everything.
http://www.152.org/youtube_rss.html
dansmojo said on September 21, 2008 1:01 PM PDT:
Thanks for this post. I made a YouTube to iTunes Podcast Yahoo Pipe out of this:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=53721391a93317e2d20fa3c122066e27
So you can have your YouTube subscriptions as an iTunes Podcast and watch them on your iPhone.
The user-favorites feed really should have the updated field set to when the item was favorited. Currently, the feed items seem to indicate the date the video was updated and published.
Maybe have an optional orderby=favorited?
It's not really so much a favorites feed, otherwise. It's just a list of videos that have at no particular time been favorited by a particular user.
As is, this feed is not particularly good for lifestreams or feedreaders.
dekaru said on October 18, 2008 8:18 PM PDT:
I made a few other yahoo pipes you might want to check out:
http://morsapapa.blogspot.com/2007/11/youtube-tips-feeds-downloads-etc.html
cheers
Im a complete Noob when it comes to this stuff. I have a new Video website and i need the link from Subscriptions ending in .rss but I cant seem to find out how to do it?
I need a Dummies guide!
John
www.johnmasters.biz
James said on January 5, 2009 3:00 PM PDT:
How do you do a search feed:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=mapreduce
and sort the search to put the most recently uploaded videos at the top?
Thanks,
James
@James:
That's exactly what the feed you mentioned does. You can't miss "orderby=updated" which should be self-explanatory.
said on January 7, 2009 11:51 AM PDT:
Is there a way (such as a Pipe) to get an entire playlist as an iTunes podcast?
said on January 7, 2009 2:11 PM PDT:
Thanks.... awesome. Why don't Youtube put these front and center?
Marc said on January 17, 2009 2:35 AM PDT:
the youtube api reference guide as pointed earlier by carey should answer most of your questions about youtube feeds:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html#Video_Feeds
i started my own site using the guide above
http://youtubeoffline.com
Joris said on January 20, 2009 5:14 PM PDT:
An hour ago I found out that they do not use this kind of feeds anymore:
http://youtube.com/rss/user/USERNAMe/video.rss
You get automatically redirected to:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/USERNAME/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&client=ytapi-youtube-rss-redirect
it f*cked up my whole api system, does anyone know why? And is the first kind of feed comming back?
said on January 22, 2009 10:39 PM PDT:
Joris, I've been working on this for hours now. I have similar problems.
"http://youtube.com/rss/user/USERNAMe/video.rss" is not coming back.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/USERNAME/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published
is the new feed. It hasn't been updating often enough today though. I'm peeved. Let me know what you find.
It was an easy fix and it works alright so there you go
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipe/pipe.info?_id=2ad80049ce80c9cc2331291a72a0ce80
I means
http://tinyurl.com/aql59h
Cause the other link fails
said on January 23, 2009 3:33 PM PDT:
Ok. YTpodcaster appears to be down. I'm trying to turn my subscriptions into an rss feed that will take my videos into the zune software so that I can watch them with auto updates. Is this possible?
said on January 23, 2009 4:18 PM PDT:
@MoreVinnie
You should publish that. Otherwise it will not come up in searches.
ok
http://tinyurl.com/YoutubePipes
be sure to save a copy for yourself and name it something different
I just copied some one elses pipe an fixed the feed location so no credit to me
doesn't have the video in the feed just the link to the video if someone could fix that I'll see what i can do
DarkJesus said on January 27, 2009 1:37 PM PDT:
Does anyone have an updated version of a youtube subscriptions to podcast pipe? I tried tweaking dansmojo's pipe, but I couldn't make it work.
Duke said on February 2, 2009 4:50 PM PDT:
Ooyio.com let's you create a personal youtube RSS feed. It let's you pick videos right from within youtube.com using a grease monkey script and makes a personal feed, the feed can put out FLV or MP4. I use it with my iPhone to take music videos with me. If you get the RSS Player app you can even download the stuff over the air.
www.ooyio.com
said on March 3, 2009 4:03 PM PDT:
Has anyone been successful at getting more than 25 favorites to show up for a particular user.
Why is the rss favorites feed limited to 25?
said on March 16, 2009 3:22 PM PDT:
Thanks! Just what I needed. Works great.
Does this work with the new Beta profile?
Beta profiles are just an interface change and nothing more.
If that's the case, then I'm not seeing any results coming up for my username. Where's the pipe getting the data?
I've tried to run the pipe and it works just fine. It just merges the feeds for all the channels you've subscribed to. YouTube offers feeds for subscriptions and for the videos uploaded to a channel.
I tried my username, sc0ttkclark, and I get nothing. I know at least a few of my subscribed users had videos recently that should pop up there right?
For some reason, your list of subscriptions is not publicly accessible using the API.
The feed returns: "User must be logged in to access these subscriptions". It could be a bug or a privacy setting you've enabled, but it's not related to the new format for channels.
Chase said on May 5, 2009 9:43 AM PDT:
My feed worked for months and then suddenly stopped. Any ideas?
Guys try this feed:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/YOURUSERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos
JJ said on June 17, 2009 2:09 PM PDT:
I am having difficulty creating a podcast from a YouTube channel.
Is this process possible?
The specific problem is once I have created a RSS feed (from a RSS Feed Generator) iTunes declines it.
Has anyone done this process before...any helpful tips, trick and steps would be very much appreciated?
Thanks.......
Chase said on June 25, 2009 1:51 AM PDT:
@hM6q5AwchOsuJqJkrrA6J2Dh
Use this one instead, much better layout!
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/YOURUSERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos
