Episode: 3695
Title: HPR3695: How I watch youtube with newsboat
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3695/hpr3695.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:11:39

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,695 for Friday the 30th of September 2022.
Today's show is entitled, How I Watch You Two with Newsboat.
It is hosted by BINARC and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
This show is about how I watch YouTube videos using the Newsboat RSS Reader program on Linux
and Unix.
So getting into it, I think, personally, I think the YouTube web UI is distracting and
typically when I go on YouTube, I only want to watch one or two videos about something
specific or by a specific person.
I think the sidebar with recommendations, there's a lot of bright colors and distracting
thumbnails and comments from the peanut gallery.
It makes it difficult to stay focused.
So I decided I want to consume videos the same way I consume everything else, via RSS.
RSS is my favorite way of aggregating things that other people have made because it allows
me to view the content in the ways that I want to view the content.
Sort of a style agnostic presentation of the content or I guess a style agnostic distribution
of the content and then the users depending on their client get to choose what to do with
this content.
So if you want to follow these instructions, the only dependencies you need on a standard
Linux or Unix system, the Newsboat command and a video player, I'm using MPV in this
example.
I really like MPV.
And for my video player, the program I am using is called MPV.
I like MPV quite a lot.
If you supply a Web URL that points to a page that contains some media as an argument
to MPV, it will just play that media.
It's quite handy.
Additionally, I am using a program called YT-DLP.
This is a program that downloads videos from YouTube and optionally can extract audio.
This is really useful if you want to save something for later.
So the first step to get an RSS feed is to find where to find the RSS feeds on YouTube.
So currently YouTube provides RSS feeds for channels.
I'm not sure how long they're going to be.
I continue to support this, but when they stop providing RSS feeds, they'll have to
start scraping their website.
So the first thing you need to know to get a YouTube feed or an RSS feed for a YouTube
channel is you have to find the YouTube channel ID.
Recently, I've noticed a lot of YouTube channels have started being referenced by like
a vanity ID, display name instead of a channel ID points to the channel.
This is a little bit frustrating, but we can use a little bit of command line magic to
find a channel ID for any given channel.
Because all of the channel IDs start with the string UC, capital U capital C.
So in my example, I am curling a YouTube channel, a link to a YouTube channel with
a vanity URL, and then piping that through Grap dash dash color, and then the Grap argument
is quote Href equals backslash quote HETPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash channel slash
U capital C double quote, and then it prints out a lot of nonsense, but with the Grap dash
dash color option, you can find the link.
So the full link would be HETPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash channel slash UC, and
then the rest of the string that points to the channel.
In order to turn this channel ID into something useful, we create the following URL.
So instead of YouTube.com slash channel, followed by the ID, the RSS feed how you get to
it is YouTube.com slash feeds slash videos dot XML question mark channel underscore ID equals
and then the channel string.
This can be kind of tedious to do if you have a lot of YouTube subscriptions in your existing
YouTube account, so you can use Google takeout, I have a link for Google takeout, Google
takeout lets you export data from the various Google sites, and the most useful one, at
least for me in writing this, and you know, using newsboat over the last couple months
to watch YouTube is exporting YouTube subscriptions, so I don't have to manually do this for every
channel I'm subscribed to, Google takeout can be a bit confusing to use, really deselect
everything except for YouTube subscriptions because there's a lot of data in there.
The export format is a CSV, it contains channel IDs for the subscriptions, so the CSV looks
something like column one, channel ID, column two, URL, column three, channel title, you can
edit this in a program like Libra Office.
I just use them because CSV editing in them is a little bit faster, and the search and
replace functions are more robust.
So building a URL list for newsboat, newsboat reads the list of URLs from tillthoslash.config slash
newsboat slash URL, so every URL we add to this list is automatically fetched by newsboat
and you can make separate URL lists for like videos or standard text feeds or even audio,
and then when you launch newsboat, if you pass the dash, I think it's dash U, the dash U flag,
and then specify a path to a different URL list and load that instead of the default list.
So it's kind of robust, you can aliass it, for example, I typically don't do that though.
Once we have our subscription CSV exported, we have to modify it so a newsboat will accept
the list of URLs, so I delete.
The first row, the first column, and the comma, and then replace the comma between the URL
and the channel name with a tab character, and then I run a said command to replace the
component of the link that directs to the web version of the channel and replace that
with the link to the RSS feed of the channel.
We can use search in a place to do this, but I just use said, I don't think I even have
a labor office installed, so most of this was all done with them and said, another interesting
thing about newsboat, newsboat only reads the first field of every row, not CSV, it has
to be white space delimited or delimited with the internal field separator, but what this
means is if we put a white space between the URL that points to the RSS feed and the channel
name, it makes it a lot easier to manage subscriptions, or at least the YouTube channels
that we are pulling into our RSS reader, which is a newsboat.
The last thing to do is to configure a newsboat, add some macros.
So the newsboat configuration file is at tilde.config slash newsboat slash config.
My newsboat configuration file looks something like auto dash reload, yes.
This means that every time I start newsboat it automatically refreshes the feeds, there's
a bunch of stuff for them key bindings, and then the most important part for watching
videos is the macros set up.
So the macros set up looks something like browser, link handler, macro, comma, open
and browser.
So the prefix key for our macro is going to be the comma character on our keyboard.
To launch the video, or launch the video player for that video, I have the v macro set,
so the syntax on the configuration file for that is macro v set browser quote set sid-fmpv
closed quote semicolon open and browser semicolon s I also have a macro to download the
video using yt-dlp.
This rule looks something like macro d set browser quote yt-dlp closed quote semicolon
open-in-browser closed quote set browser link handler.
And then I have another macro with the a key that downloads the audio only, that's the
same as the last macro except within the quotes the command is yt-dlp-dash embed-metadada-xic-fbest
audio slash best.
All of these configurations, it's a short configuration file, but it's in the show notes, so it's
easier to copy and paste.
And then the last thing I have is a video demonstration of using newsboat to watch videos
in order to execute the macros you type the comma key and then the v key or whatever letter
you set it to, similar to how in vim you execute a macro you have to type the act character
and then the letter of the macro it's not it's not like a key combination it's a prefix
key and then no key press and then the argument for the macro.
I tried to encode this video as a gif but it was like 500 megabytes so it's a web m instead
better compression.
And the last thing I leave you with is a list of URLs that you can put in your newsboat
URL file.
If you haven't caught on by now this is almost a roundabout way of giving some YouTube
recommendations of channels I obviously thought were good enough to go out of my way to get
an RSS link for and then put it in my RSS reader newsboat.
So yeah, some recommendations, I'm not going to go through them all, you can go through
them on your own and decide if it's something you want to keep based on your own taste
in videos and content.
But all of these are computer related or technology adjacent at least I sort of filtered
through and found technology adjacent ones because after all this is hacker public radio.
Thanks for listening to hacker public radio hopefully this has been useful for you or at
least it may be it'll be interesting you know now you know that YouTube has your RSS YouTube
has RSS feeds and you can use an RSS reader to watch these videos and even a command line
RSS reader to launch a video player using some sort of script ability.
Again hopefully it's helpful if nothing else it's kind of cool thanks for listening.
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