Watching YouTube videos

Saturday, February 18th, 2017 at 08:43pm

For a long time I didn’t like most YouTube videos, often I would be directed (from a blog, twitter, etc post) to a YouTube video. Sometimes they would be good, but what I remember most was being annoyed by a video that took minutes to show or say something that could be explained in a single paragraph or image.

But the quality improved and I started to notice that there were a few creators whose videos I enjoyed. When I ended up at one of theirs I would find myself also watching other videos that they had made.

My first attempt at getting notifications about new videos was to subscribe to the channels to get the email notifications. This didn’t work so well as I was either not notified about a new video, or would be notified days after it was released. It also didn’t help that there were some creators where I was only interested in some of their videos, not all of them.

I remembered that there was some form of RSS feed and the first information I found was about an RSS feed of the videos in the channels that you are subscribed to. But this had since been discontinued and also would have given more videos than I wanted.

I then looked at what RSS feeds were still available and after some digging I found that you could target a user, a channel or a specific playlist:

  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=
  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=

This is exactly what I was looking for as I could add these to my rss2email config with new gmail filters. I do also subscribe to the user/channel via YouTube as a small way of indicating my support.

So what are the videos I have found myself watching? These ones:

Like the sites I follow via RSS feeds I expect this list to grow over time. And looking back at that post I should post an updated list of feeds and also grab anything I want from Delicious as I haven’t used it in a long time and I don’t know what will happen to it…

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