HACKER Q&A
📣 PaulDavisThe1st

Non-YouTube tools for tracking YT channels?


I'm looking for some sort of notification system (email would be fine, other forms also fine) that could read a list of channel URLs and let me know when they release new videos.

I want a tool that runs outside the web browser if possible, but in-browser is OK if there's really no other way.

I've hunted around but so far have failed to find anything remotely like this. There are many channels that I love watching regularly but I do not want to use YouTube to know that there's a new video out on one of them.

Any ideas?

  👤 troydavis Accepted Answer ✓
Every channel and playlist has an RSS feed that’s updated when a video is added. The RSS URL is in a consistent format, and is in the HTML header.

Google for “youtube rss url format” or “rss autodiscovery” for more.

👤 1vuio0pswjnm7
I created a solution for retrieving an entire channel outside the browser (submitted to HN). It converts the JSON to a TSV table. Keeping updated on newly added videos is simply a matter of retrieving the first page again periodically. Alternatively, one can use the RSS feed.

Smartphone apps will work, too. NewPipe will do the job, as well as AntennaPod. Although the later will not download and play the videos.

👤 pipiscrew
in nutshell, you grab the user/channel_id, is always at browser URL when viewing user profile. Then you add the id taken to any of these URLs, examples

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=HALIDONMUSIC

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

these are RSS, then you use an application RSS reader (aggregator) like https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/releases

or even online http://www.feedly.com/ https://www.inoreader.com