YouTube Is Better With RSS
Choose what videos and playlists you want to subscribe to
Did you know that every YouTube channel has a secret RSS feed? Short for “Really Simple Syndication”, it is an XML file that contains the latest entries published on a website, which you can subscribe to using a feed reader. Practically all blogs and news sites support RSS, even forums like Reddit too! The About Feeds website goes into more detail and shows you how to get one yourself if you’re interested.
Being in control of your YouTube feed is nice, but most people probably don’t care about that; the YouTube app is just more convenient. But there is an ace up the metaphorical RSS sleeve. Three aces, in fact.
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A good feed reader lets you filter out entries using filter rules. YouTube RSS feeds don’t have tags, but you can still filter by the video title and description.
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Did you know every YouTube playlist has a secret RSS feed too? If you only care about a channel’s specific series (and they are kind enough to make a playlist for it), you can subscribe to just those videos!
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Saving the best for last, every YouTube channel also has 3 secret playlists… One for just videos, one for just shorts, and one for livestreams. Yes, you can subscribe to just videos and not be flooded with shorts spam. This is freaking awesome.
To access these feeds, you either need the channel ID or the playlist ID, which can be found in the YouTube URL. If instead of a channel ID you see a @username, search up “youtube channel id finder”. Now just paste it at the end of the correct URL.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=To get the playlist ID for just videos or shorts or livestreams, change the first two letters of the channel ID (which will always be UC) to any of these other letters.
| Videos | Shorts | Livestreams |
|---|---|---|
UULF | UUSH | UULV |
