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Sunday 24 July 2011

YouTube Feeds Tips


YouTube Feeds Tips

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/garyferro/favorites?orderby=updated
(replace garyferro with your favorite username)

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)

14 comments:

  1. 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? :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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

    ReplyDelete
  4. ooooooooooo, 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.

    ReplyDelete
  5. 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?

    ReplyDelete
  6. 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?

    ReplyDelete
  7. 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?

    ReplyDelete
  8. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  9. 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?

    ReplyDelete
  10. 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?

    ReplyDelete
  11. 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

    ReplyDelete
  12. said...

    Chase and hm6...

    Neither of these works in iTunes for me. I get a message saying there are no playable episodes.
    July 13, 2009 9:40 AM
    shashi said...

    i am not able to get all uploaded videos only a sub set is returned

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/LokSattaParty/uploads

    there are 88 videos only 26 are returned :(
    August 6, 2009 10:44 PM
    Alex Chitu said...

    Feeds are usually for recent items, so they'll never display all the items. If my blog's feed displayed all my 3000 posts, it would be huge, it would load slowly, but feed readers would only need the most recent posts.

    YouTube's feeds use pagination, so you should add the start-index parameter to change the first item displayed. For example:

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/LokSattaParty/uploads?start-index=26
    August 6, 2009 10:56 PM
    Anonymous said...

    i think that feeds should also allow to display all at once
    September 3, 2009 9:11 PM
    music videos said...

    where can i youtube most recent music videos feeds ?

    miley.
    September 10, 2009 11:09 AM
    firma ekle said...

    how can i take link and title with gdata api?
    November 12, 2009 2:02 PM
    Sylvester said...

    Thank You So Much..

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/YOURUSERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos
    December 31, 2009 8:56 AM

    ReplyDelete
  13. Lima said...

    Hello, first congratulations on the blog and iunformações always very useful!

    You have to pass me the link for me to get this application that appears in this video? I believe it is an application for me to get the ID of the video and puts it in second life.
    If you can help me appreciate the attention.

    Thanks, I'm using a translator I apologize for the mistakes of concordances in the text.

    sandro.lim @ hotmail.com

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=463X0BSadFk
    January 16, 2011 1:34 PM
    David L. Rosengarden said...

    I just can't break this and will finally be quitting after 6 hours wasted to learn that it seems NOT POSSIBLE.

    I want to create a feed for iTunes that will take the videos that I already put on YouTube channel. Simple - just have iTunes grab podcasts when alerted through the feed that I uploaded a new video to YouTube channel. Why can I not get this to work? Rsshandler, ytconverter, pipes, NOTHING works!

    PLEASE HELP!
    April 9, 2011 3:42 PM
    VM said...

    How can I generate feed of a specific user with his featured video
    I mean featured video should be first to be in list
    need help please do reply if you have solution it is driving me crazy
    May 4, 2011 6:57 AM
    jelbee said...

    what is the feed of the most viewed videos in a week?
    July 10, 2011 6:33 AM
    Anonymous said...

    Is there a way of making Google Reader alert me whenever a new comment is made on a favorite video, a liked video, or a video on my watch list?
    July 23, 2011 7:05 PM

    ReplyDelete
  14. Razie said...

    It doesn't work for me in TVersity: it seems that youtube wants users logged in to see the first rss: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/ravennger/subscriptions
    December 31, 2009 11:13 AM
    Steve said...

    http://909sickle.com/steve/youtube/

    I made program for writing the URLs for you. Suggestions welcome.
    February 5, 2010 2:21 PM
    fkwblow said...

    hey,
    is there a way to fetch the total number of favorite videos(or playlists, etc) a user has?

    Thanks in advanced!
    April 10, 2010 3:03 PM
    Alex Chitu said...

    @fkwblow:

    The total number of items can be obtained from a feed by checking the value of openSearch:totalResults.
    April 10, 2010 3:13 PM
    Anonymous said...

    I want to grab the favorites from a channel. Works like a charm unless the user has no own uploads. If that is the case, nothing gets returned. As anyone made the same experience and maybe found a solution?
    May 7, 2010 3:34 AM
    Mark R said...

    What about feeds for latest updates by keyword?

    Is that available?

    Thanks
    May 12, 2010 8:18 AM
    Anonymous said...

    Is there a way to show more than 25 videos in the feed? I have a channel where there are 150 uploaded and I want to pull all of them in and its only letting me pull in the last 25?
    July 8, 2010 2:34 PM
    Anonymous said...

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/50653251EDB4E764

    is resulting in 'Service Unavailable', been getting this for 2 days on mine as well, ugh. where do i find information on this?
    August 11, 2010 6:42 PM
    Ch said...

    Hey Alex!

    I have tried the Yahoo Pipe with no results at all.

    Are you aware to any new changes to YouTube's API?

    Thanks in advance.

    Carlos
    August 15, 2010 4:10 PM
    Phallus Nocturne said...

    I tried EVERYTHING out there but nothing worked... Here's how I did it using nothing but what Youtube gives you:

    1- Log in Youtube
    2- Go to your Account Settings
    3- Left side menu select "Activity Sharing"
    4- Checkmark "Subscribe to a channel"

    Skip to "Or" below instead of step 5 and 6

    5- Go to your Subscriptions page
    6- Get the feed from the page (ie: On the right side of the address bar)

    7- In Miro: Sidebar> Add feed (the usual)
    8- Paste feed
    Voilà!

    Or (Just realized this and I won't erase the previous just in case!)
    Replace YOURUSERNAME with your username :) doh!


    http: //gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/YOURUSERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos?client=ytapi-youtube-user&v=2


    *: I've put a space between http: and //gdata so that the URL didn't get all screwed up! (Remove the space when pasting!)

    The URL is a bit different from the ones on the blog and on Google Code.. Mainly it has /base/ instead of /api/. And, after the last /, instead of "subscription" there is "newsubscriptionvideos"

    If that doesn't work for you, oh well, I tried!
    September 2, 2010 8:39 PM
    azelez said...

    How do I select to limit the search to only the latest week?
    September 10, 2010 12:25 PM
    Anonymous said...

    This worked for me (finally):

    1- Log in Youtube
    2- Go to your Account Settings
    3- Left side menu select "Activity Sharing"
    4- Checkmark "Subscribe to a channel"
    5- Go to your Subscriptions page
    6- Get the feed from the page

    Something like:
    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/MY_YOUTUBE_USER_NAME/newsubscriptionvideos
    September 18, 2010 6:48 AM
    L. Mohan Arun said...

    how do i get an RSS feed of youtube videos that have just crossed a threshold of number of views that I specify? (Say >5000 views)
    October 22, 2010 8:03 PM
    BAltimore limo said...

    I have tried the Yahoo Pipe with no results at all.

    Are you aware to any new changes to YouTube's API?
    December 4, 2010 12:31 PM

    ReplyDelete