hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2716.txt

Episode: 2716
Title: HPR2716: Really Simple YouTube
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2716/hpr2716.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 08:03:33

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This in HPR episode 2007-116 entitled, Really Simple YouTube.
It is hosted by Ajara and in about 7 minutes long, and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is Ajax claims how he makes YouTube come to him using RSS feeds.
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Let's go to hackerpublicradio, this is Taj, and I'm just going to make a quick episode about something that I do personally.
I thought everybody had kind of at least thought about it, figured out at this point,
but I had mentioned it recently to a couple of people that I think are pretty intelligent,
and they both had sort of the same reaction to what I said.
They were like, oh, I never thought of doing that.
So I figured I would go ahead and just make an episode.
Maybe some other people feel the same way.
There's been a few episodes recently about YouTube and how people consume YouTube
and how that's a big thing for them.
And this is going to kind of play into that.
Like most of the people listening to this, a lot of my entertainment, and frankly at this point in education,
is coming from watching YouTube.
That I think is awesome that we have this collective space to put all this knowledge.
The downside of it to me is specifically the YouTube site itself.
And I'm sure I'm not the only person who has fallen down the YouTube recommendations hole.
The algorithms that YouTube create for those recommendations are just specifically designed to create, you know,
quote, unquote, engagement, which, you know, for them or views equals more advertising equals more money for Google.
And I'm not against them making money for their product.
I don't want this to come off that way.
But I know myself and I know that I will fall into that and waste a lot of time that I could use to be productive for other things.
So the way that I do this is I pull it to me.
I don't go to the YouTube site. I bring YouTube to me.
Now I'm saying this as I also pay for YouTube TV and Google music at this point.
So I feel like I'm giving Google the money that I would make for watching ads.
And actually if I go to the site, I don't watch ads anyways.
So for me, I don't have any moral issues with doing what I'm doing.
I'm sure some people may, but you know, that's up to each individual on how to do it.
So how do I fix this problem?
So I love RSS.
RSS does everything for me.
I get my news through RSS. I get my podcasts through RSS.
And it probably gets that I get my YouTube videos through RSS.
Now my setup revolves around using tiny, tiny RSS,
which if you don't know what tiny, tiny RSS is, it's a self-hosted RSS feed reader.
I spun this up on my home server basically once Google Reader went away.
I was a big fan of Google Reader.
And when that collapsed, actually tiny, tiny RSS is why I started running a home server.
I was to be able to have a way to control my RSS feeds for me.
And I wanted to sink it across multiple devices.
So having it on its own server was beneficial.
Now the stuff I'm going to talk about is sort of specific to tiny, tiny RSS.
But you can probably replicate this in any other feed reader you want to use.
One of the things that I've thought about and have never tried is trying this with a podcast,
like a pod catcher, to see if it would pull this down.
Like I said, I haven't tried that yet.
If you do, mileage may vary.
So the first thing to do is to find the channels that you want to watch.
Usually, I'm sure at this point most people have subscriptions on YouTube.
But on the back end, Google actually organizes these things by RSS feeds.
So you just have to find out what that RSS feed is.
And it's actually pretty easy.
In the show notes, I'm going to link two sites.
The first site is just going to be a really quick hack if you just want to add a single channel.
So you can go to the channel page on YouTube and then go to View Source
and then pull out the code that will lead you straight to the RSS feed.
So that's a really good way of doing it for just one channel.
So at this point, if I add something to my subscriptions or want to follow something,
I usually use this method because it's the easiest.
The other one is actually from Google itself.
And it shows you how to export your YouTube subscriptions list as an opml file.
And an opml file is just an XML file.
And they're really easy to parse.
So you can go in and actually get the URLs for the RSS feeds that you want to use.
So once you have those, you put them in your feed reader.
I, in my feed reader, I make a category that is specifically YouTube videos.
So I can make that category.
And then when I click it, it lists all the videos that have been published since the last time I looked.
And I can mark them red just like anything else.
The nice thing about Tiny Tiny RSS specifically is that it has a plug-in that will actually embed the video player inside the article.
So when I click on it, it just presents the player to me.
So I can just watch it right there.
I never have to leave Tiny Tiny RSS, which is fantastic.
Like I said, you may not get that functionality in another feed reader, but it's worth playing around with them.
I'm assuming.
Another thing, kind of a bonus tip.
I've started to use PeerTube a lot to try to find another way to consume media just because I really like the federated model.
PeerTube is kind of a YouTube replacement that's built on activity pub, which is a standard that mastered on uses and a few other of these federated services.
They even make it easier. You can actually go to any channel in PeerTube.
And it has a link to subscribe to the RSS feed.
So right underneath my YouTube, I have a PeerTube listing that has the channels I follow on PeerTube, which is kind of nice.
So I can watch those.
Now, the only problem with that is it doesn't do the embed like the YouTube does.
So I do have to go to the site.
But for me, that site's not as is egregious because I don't get sucked into any recommendations because they really don't do recommendations.
They're just sort of what's new. And I typically don't look at that. So it's not a distraction.
So really, that's it. That's that's how I watch all of my videos without ever having to go to the YouTube site.
I also do something similar on my Android devices.
And I would tell you about it.
But I'm pretty sure Ken Fallon would be a lot happier if I just make that a second show.
So this is a cliffhanger.
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