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unicornporn

Uhm, what[1]?. It's been available at:

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

I know because I've been using those feeds every day for the channels I follow.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_jus...

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No, that's not the one that YouTube removed that annoyed everyone. You used to be able to get a single feed of the new videos on the channels you're subscribed to. That's not this, and still doesn't exist anymore.

Are you sure? I just set up a few IFTTT triggers and actions based on YouTube videos with a certain keywords from a couple of channels last week, and those channe specific RSS feeds worked just fine.

Edit: OK, I see what you mean. Unified feed across ALL channels you're subscribed to. That's not what I'm using.

Yup, the unified feed is exactly what I'm referring to.

Put simply, you're wrong.

OK, then you point me to the unified feed for your subscriptions that YouTube publish.

Oh wait, you can't, because there hasn't been one for ages now. They only have per-channel and per-playlist feeds.

Isn't that basically double subscribing to channels? The "viewed" indicators would be out of sync, why would you want to do that?

Imagine if you didn't have a youtube account and were using RSS feeds for particular channels. Would anyone do that if it were possible? Surely not! Nobody would prefer RSS feeds per channel that they were interested in, integrated into their existing feed reader.

What? It is possible, and it's exactly how I've been using YouTube for about a year. I don't have a YouTube account, I add the "Uploads" feed for each channel I'm interested in to my reader.

Then you're not actually subscribed to any channel, and you don't show up as a subscriber in their analytics.

That's one of the main reasons I use it that way. Aside from that, it's been a better experience than subscribing in YouTube, when I did that, there'd be a number next to the channels but I could never decipher exactly what it meant, it certainly wasn't just new uploads.

Then why did you make the remark about 'double subscribing'?

Also, there's a good reason for subscribing to channels: it actually help the channel creator because the subscriber number (which is what that number is) feeds into their algorithms regarding reach.

No. It was just a feed of the changes to the channels you're subscribed to. There's no double subscription here. It was this in feed form: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

I had this quite shity function to give me the feed URL of a channel when I give it the URL of a video:

  idyoutube ()
  {
    if [[ "$1" = *\=* ]]; then
        vidid=$(echo "$1" | cut -d "&" -f 1 | cut -d "=" -f 2);
    else
        vidid=$(echo "$1" | cut -d "/" -f 4);
    fi;
    id=$(curl -s "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${vidid}" | tac | \grep "data-channel-external-id=" -m 1 | tr " " "\n" | \grep "data-channel-external-id" -m 1 | cut -d '"' -f 2)
    echo -en "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=${id}\n"
  }

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