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Tell HN: YouTube RSS feeds are gone

79 points by dvh ↗ HN
The RSS feeds are returning 404, for example https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxahdLz7bap-VDs9h35A and link that used to be on the channel's "Videos" page is gone as well. Is this the end of RSS feeds on youtube?

42 comments

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KomoD
I had no clue YouTube had RSS feeds and now I'm too late :/
crtasm
They're back online - try now!
vdaea
I clicked on one of the ones I follow and it showed a 500 error, then after refreshing it showed a 404 error, so hopefully temporary, but this being Google, these feeds were clearly going to disappear one day.
Eddy_Viscosity2
I'm using newsblur for rss and am still getting youtube RSS feeds.
corobo
Are they still updating or is newsblur caching the feed at the point before it 404'd?
happytoexplain
I've probably watched (actively and passively) on average, hours of YouTube every day for a decade. In all that time, RSS is exclusively how I've consumed those videos, aside from sometimes clicking on videos in the sidebar of the video I arrived at via RSS.

If RSS goes away and no 3rd party is able to restore it, I really don't know what I'd do. I can't imagine stopping watching all of the channels I follow, but I also can't imagine using email or app notifications. Those vectors are simply unacceptable for the nature of this particular information stream.

xz18r
There are multiple ways to solve your case: - set up an account with email notifications and use something like KillTheNewsletter to deliver them via RSS - set up your own alternative YouTube frontend (or register for a public one like kavin.rocks) that supports RSS feeds. Things like Piped or Invidious support it iirc. - get an actual YouTube account and work with subscriptions. You support the channel you like with it and have everything in a handy overview.

I am a big time RSS user but never took the time to move it all over there, been using the subscriptions page as my YouTube “homepage” for a decade now and it works for me.

happytoexplain
- KillTheNewsletter

Looks like I'd have to make a YouTube account for every channel to get separate feeds, or else combine every channel into one big feed.

- subscriptions

Similarly, it looks like this is just one big list of videos from every channel, with only a handful fitting on screen at once, and they don't go away once I've watched/clicked on the video, so there's no concept of read/unread. It also means I would have yet another aggregation webpage I periodically visit, as opposed to having most of my information feed in two places (one tab for email and one tab for RSS).

- set up your own alternative

This is currently outside my skillset, but it may ultimately be the direction I go in (if the outage isn't just a bug). Thanks for these nouns - I can use them to get started.

EvanAnderson
I'm pretty much in the same boat as you-- all my YouTube consumption has been thru my self-hosted RSS reader. I really like read/unread for all my "media" (blogs, YouTube, etc) in a single place.

All those alternatives sound bad to me.

I suppose in the short term I will cobble something together w/ yt-dlp to download JSON from YouTube and ETL that into the tt-rss database. That'll work until Google decides it doesn't, too.

ComplexSystems
I'm not sure how much programming experience you have, but I'd imagine it'd be a fairly quick Python script to scrape all of your subscriptions and put things together in RSS form. You could probably build a quick Flask app which serves the RSS feed from some custom query string representing a YouTube video id. With ChatGPT you could probably build this out in a day.
d0mine
To get an idea of how it might look, here's a telegram bot that notifies you about new videos on the channels you have subscribed to. It consists of approximately 150 lines of Python code. You can find the code here: https://gist.github.com/zed/a48da032ace0f4ff1c79cd80854bb8fd
vdaea
That uses the rss feed to find new videos.
d0mine
It utilizes hubbub push-notifications to deliver information about new videos in RSS format. It is unclear whether it requires the corresponding RSS feed to be operational.

In any case, it just demonstrates the general approach: subscribe to a topic, and receive new events as soon as they happen without polling. The point is that it doesn't require much code: just glue together corresponding APIs.

solarkraft
I built something similar (and then never documented it) to generate (audio) podcast feeds from any playlist or channel or grab an audio file from a video:

https://github.com/solarkraft/ytdl-podcast

I haven't used it in a while, so I'm not sure that it currently works, but perhaps it'll contain some useful hints.

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duckman1
The impact of this is not worth considering.
janice1999
It is for the people using it. Also it's yet another example of the death of open standards and interoperability.
user982
YouTube embeds suddenly started crashing one of my browsers with OOM errors today. The timing may be related to broader changes.
jesusofnazarath
Thankfully Invidious provides their own RSS feeds
minus7
Unfortunately that feature of invidious also seems to depend on the upstream RSS URLs and the feeds are just empty at the moment
GrumpySloth
I guess I’ll stop watching YouTube. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
msadowski
That’s a bummer if true and not a temporary issue. The RSS is my workflow for creating a newsletter and if RSS does not work then I’m way less likely to include any yt content because I simply won’t come across this. It’s not like Google would care about this either.
smileybarry
Both the OP's URL and the one linked by @xnx work for me, could it have been temporary? Or maybe a caching issue? (And my region's YouTube CDN servers aren't affected?) Could be Google are actually removing this but A/B testing it first?
notanavacado
I believe it just started working again. It was not working for me until a few minutes ago.
EvanAnderson
Confirmed working for me again, too. My feed reader is updating again.

I think I'm still going to look at building a yt-dlp/JSON to RSS alternative, though. I don't trust that this isn't foreshadowing and not a bug.

user982
RSS feeds are resolving for me again, and the embedded YouTube crash I mentioned in this thread seems to have simultaneously stopped. Hopefully whatever this was has been reverted.
voussoir
I use Youtube's RSS feeds in one of my programs and this happens once every couple of months. They'll 404 or 503 for half a day and then come back.

Not looking forward to the day they don't come back, of course!

ecef9-8c0f-4374
I hope this is a bug and gets fixed. The site never worked for me. "Watch later" a list of dead videos of which I can't even find out the names. Since I found the feeds I use only RSS with Feedbro. Well.. I will properly save a lot of time not watching youtube anymore.
freediver
Noticed this yesterday too. Perhaps a mistake?