(cache) YouTube Feeds

Sunday, January 06, 2008

YouTube Feeds

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=jigsaw

4. 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

29 comments ( Post a comment )

radu.capan said on January 6, 2008 11:12 AM PDT:

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

Anonymous said on January 6, 2008 12:57 PM PDT:

is there a way to see top rated, top viewed via RSS also? thanks!

Carey said on January 6, 2008 1:14 PM PDT:

The full list of possible feeds is at code.google.com/apis/youtube/reference.html.

It looks like you can get a feed of subscribed channels from gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/nzcarey/subscriptions, for example, but not the videos themselves. You would have to subscribe to each channel’s feed or combine them with something like Yahoo! Pipes.

There’s a list of standard video feeds in the reference documentation, like top rated, most viewed, etc. You may want to change the api part of the URL to base for different formatting, like I have.

Fran Barton said on January 6, 2008 1:25 PM PDT:

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.

Ionut Alex Chitu said on January 6, 2008 3:09 PM PDT:

Update: I added Radu's suggestion.

Patrick Braga-Henebry said on January 6, 2008 9:50 PM PDT:

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)

Ionut Alex Chitu said on January 7, 2008 5:09 AM PDT:

@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.

Scott Gunsaullus said on January 8, 2008 9:40 PM PDT:

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? :(

Ionut Alex Chitu said on January 14, 2008 2:41 AM PDT:

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

Ionut Alex Chitu said on January 21, 2008 12:50 AM PDT:

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.

Anonymous 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?

Anonymous 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?

Mike the Iron Stomach said on May 12, 2008 5:42 PM PDT:

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!

Anonymous 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.

Anonymous 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?

Ionut Alex Chitu said on June 28, 2008 5:00 AM PDT:

@Anonymous:
You can add Google's video bar to shows the latest videos from your channel.

Scott Phillips said on July 24, 2008 12:23 AM PDT:

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.

David Blume said on October 11, 2008 10:22 AM PDT:

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

What do you think?