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141 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
141 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 3695
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Title: HPR3695: How I watch youtube with newsboat
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3695/hpr3695.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:11:39
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,695 for Friday the 30th of September 2022.
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Today's show is entitled, How I Watch You Two with Newsboat.
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It is hosted by BINARC and is about 11 minutes long.
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It carries an explicit flag.
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This show is about how I watch YouTube videos using the Newsboat RSS Reader program on Linux
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and Unix.
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So getting into it, I think, personally, I think the YouTube web UI is distracting and
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typically when I go on YouTube, I only want to watch one or two videos about something
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specific or by a specific person.
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I think the sidebar with recommendations, there's a lot of bright colors and distracting
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thumbnails and comments from the peanut gallery.
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It makes it difficult to stay focused.
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So I decided I want to consume videos the same way I consume everything else, via RSS.
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RSS is my favorite way of aggregating things that other people have made because it allows
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me to view the content in the ways that I want to view the content.
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Sort of a style agnostic presentation of the content or I guess a style agnostic distribution
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of the content and then the users depending on their client get to choose what to do with
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this content.
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So if you want to follow these instructions, the only dependencies you need on a standard
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Linux or Unix system, the Newsboat command and a video player, I'm using MPV in this
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example.
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I really like MPV.
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And for my video player, the program I am using is called MPV.
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I like MPV quite a lot.
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If you supply a Web URL that points to a page that contains some media as an argument
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to MPV, it will just play that media.
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It's quite handy.
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Additionally, I am using a program called YT-DLP.
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This is a program that downloads videos from YouTube and optionally can extract audio.
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This is really useful if you want to save something for later.
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So the first step to get an RSS feed is to find where to find the RSS feeds on YouTube.
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So currently YouTube provides RSS feeds for channels.
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I'm not sure how long they're going to be.
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I continue to support this, but when they stop providing RSS feeds, they'll have to
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start scraping their website.
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So the first thing you need to know to get a YouTube feed or an RSS feed for a YouTube
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channel is you have to find the YouTube channel ID.
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Recently, I've noticed a lot of YouTube channels have started being referenced by like
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a vanity ID, display name instead of a channel ID points to the channel.
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This is a little bit frustrating, but we can use a little bit of command line magic to
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find a channel ID for any given channel.
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Because all of the channel IDs start with the string UC, capital U capital C.
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So in my example, I am curling a YouTube channel, a link to a YouTube channel with
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a vanity URL, and then piping that through Grap dash dash color, and then the Grap argument
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is quote Href equals backslash quote HETPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash channel slash
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U capital C double quote, and then it prints out a lot of nonsense, but with the Grap dash
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dash color option, you can find the link.
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So the full link would be HETPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash channel slash UC, and
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then the rest of the string that points to the channel.
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In order to turn this channel ID into something useful, we create the following URL.
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So instead of YouTube.com slash channel, followed by the ID, the RSS feed how you get to
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it is YouTube.com slash feeds slash videos dot XML question mark channel underscore ID equals
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and then the channel string.
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This can be kind of tedious to do if you have a lot of YouTube subscriptions in your existing
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YouTube account, so you can use Google takeout, I have a link for Google takeout, Google
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takeout lets you export data from the various Google sites, and the most useful one, at
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least for me in writing this, and you know, using newsboat over the last couple months
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to watch YouTube is exporting YouTube subscriptions, so I don't have to manually do this for every
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channel I'm subscribed to, Google takeout can be a bit confusing to use, really deselect
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everything except for YouTube subscriptions because there's a lot of data in there.
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The export format is a CSV, it contains channel IDs for the subscriptions, so the CSV looks
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something like column one, channel ID, column two, URL, column three, channel title, you can
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edit this in a program like Libra Office.
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I just use them because CSV editing in them is a little bit faster, and the search and
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replace functions are more robust.
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So building a URL list for newsboat, newsboat reads the list of URLs from tillthoslash.config slash
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newsboat slash URL, so every URL we add to this list is automatically fetched by newsboat
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and you can make separate URL lists for like videos or standard text feeds or even audio,
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and then when you launch newsboat, if you pass the dash, I think it's dash U, the dash U flag,
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and then specify a path to a different URL list and load that instead of the default list.
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So it's kind of robust, you can aliass it, for example, I typically don't do that though.
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Once we have our subscription CSV exported, we have to modify it so a newsboat will accept
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the list of URLs, so I delete.
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The first row, the first column, and the comma, and then replace the comma between the URL
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and the channel name with a tab character, and then I run a said command to replace the
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component of the link that directs to the web version of the channel and replace that
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with the link to the RSS feed of the channel.
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We can use search in a place to do this, but I just use said, I don't think I even have
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a labor office installed, so most of this was all done with them and said, another interesting
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thing about newsboat, newsboat only reads the first field of every row, not CSV, it has
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to be white space delimited or delimited with the internal field separator, but what this
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means is if we put a white space between the URL that points to the RSS feed and the channel
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name, it makes it a lot easier to manage subscriptions, or at least the YouTube channels
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that we are pulling into our RSS reader, which is a newsboat.
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The last thing to do is to configure a newsboat, add some macros.
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So the newsboat configuration file is at tilde.config slash newsboat slash config.
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My newsboat configuration file looks something like auto dash reload, yes.
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This means that every time I start newsboat it automatically refreshes the feeds, there's
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a bunch of stuff for them key bindings, and then the most important part for watching
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videos is the macros set up.
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So the macros set up looks something like browser, link handler, macro, comma, open
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and browser.
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So the prefix key for our macro is going to be the comma character on our keyboard.
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To launch the video, or launch the video player for that video, I have the v macro set,
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so the syntax on the configuration file for that is macro v set browser quote set sid-fmpv
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closed quote semicolon open and browser semicolon s I also have a macro to download the
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video using yt-dlp.
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This rule looks something like macro d set browser quote yt-dlp closed quote semicolon
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open-in-browser closed quote set browser link handler.
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And then I have another macro with the a key that downloads the audio only, that's the
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same as the last macro except within the quotes the command is yt-dlp-dash embed-metadada-xic-fbest
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audio slash best.
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All of these configurations, it's a short configuration file, but it's in the show notes, so it's
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easier to copy and paste.
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And then the last thing I have is a video demonstration of using newsboat to watch videos
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in order to execute the macros you type the comma key and then the v key or whatever letter
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you set it to, similar to how in vim you execute a macro you have to type the act character
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and then the letter of the macro it's not it's not like a key combination it's a prefix
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key and then no key press and then the argument for the macro.
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I tried to encode this video as a gif but it was like 500 megabytes so it's a web m instead
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better compression.
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And the last thing I leave you with is a list of URLs that you can put in your newsboat
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URL file.
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If you haven't caught on by now this is almost a roundabout way of giving some YouTube
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recommendations of channels I obviously thought were good enough to go out of my way to get
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an RSS link for and then put it in my RSS reader newsboat.
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So yeah, some recommendations, I'm not going to go through them all, you can go through
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them on your own and decide if it's something you want to keep based on your own taste
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in videos and content.
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But all of these are computer related or technology adjacent at least I sort of filtered
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through and found technology adjacent ones because after all this is hacker public radio.
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Thanks for listening to hacker public radio hopefully this has been useful for you or at
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least it may be it'll be interesting you know now you know that YouTube has your RSS YouTube
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has RSS feeds and you can use an RSS reader to watch these videos and even a command line
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RSS reader to launch a video player using some sort of script ability.
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Again hopefully it's helpful if nothing else it's kind of cool thanks for listening.
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You have been listening to hacker public radio at hacker public radio does work today
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show was contributed by a hbr listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording
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or cast and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
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Hosting for hbr has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive
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and our sync.net.
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On this otherwise stated today's show is released on our creative comments attribution 4.0
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international license.
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