Feature request: construct feed URLs for YouTube channels

[superlex]

Hello,
first of all thank you and congratulations for your amazing work :)

Then,
currently, it looks like NetNewsWire doesn't find YouTube feeds if the link contains channel id instead of user name.

Example 1:
Try to add
https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN
Result: ok

Example 2:
Try to add
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChjRM_qQAaOAiLNbOGbYcRA/
Result: Feed not found

Workaround: convert the link into
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UChjRM_qQAaOAiLNbOGbYcRA
Result: ok

My environment:

• NetNewsWire Version 5.0 (2609)
• macOS 10.14.6

[brentsimmons]

We’ll fix this for 5.0.1 if it’s a defect in the feed finder. If it’s not — if it would take a special case — we’ll punt till after 5.0.1.

[brentsimmons]

This is not, strictly speaking, a defect in the feed finder. That page doesn’t link to an RSS feed (or Atom or anything else).

Finding this feed would require doing a special case — doing some pattern matching on the URL and then constructing the likely feed URL.

I’m making this a feature request and removing it from the 5.0.1 milestone.

[superlex]

Ah ok, thank you!

[ghost]

Would love this as well. As a workaround I created an AppleScript that creates the feed url, and opens it in NNW.

var base = "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="
var safari = Application('Safari')

var url = safari.windows[0].currentTab.url()
var res = url.split("/")
var id = res[res.length - 1]

safari.windows[0].currentTab.url = base + id

[xxyzz]

Maybe we can port some code from NewPipeExtractor(https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/tree/dev/extractor/src/main/java/org/schabi/newpipe/extractor/services/youtube)

[fannar]

Youtube channels do have a RSS link, but NNW doesn't recognize it.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UChjRM_qQAaOAiLNbOGbYcRA">

[jinyuzu99]

Youtube channels do have a RSS link, but NNW doesn't recognize it.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UChjRM_qQAaOAiLNbOGbYcRA">

@brentsimmons you can let nnw find youtube rss link via this html element.

[brentsimmons]

Sounds like it could be a bug in our code that looks for the <link… tag with the RSS URL.

[vincode-io]

@fannar Could you please supply us with the URL you found the link element in? I'm not seeing it when looking at the source for https://www.youtube.com/user/TheVolvorocks where I would expect to see it.

[xxyzz]

I'm not seeing it when looking at the source for https://www.youtube.com/user/TheVolvorocks where I would expect to see it.

It's inside the body tag:

[brentsimmons]

I just did a workaround so that we’ll detect feed links in YouTube pages like https://www.youtube.com/user/TheVolvorocks

Our code stopped looking once it hit the body tag, since feed links should be in the head section. I created a special case for YouTube where it will continue scanning for feed links, instead of stopping, once it hits the body tag.

[ednl]

Have YouTube since gone one step further in removing all mention of RSS? ;( I'm not seeing any rss links on channel pages. I have a few old YouTube subscriptions in NNW so I can still add them manually by editing an exported list but that's not really convenient. E.g. I don't see any rss link in the source for https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCxKPNMqjnqbxVEt1tyDUsA and consequently the toolbar extension doesn't find anything. But my old link works in NNW!

Edit: huh? Now it does work when I click my own example link from here, after I checked the "TheVolvorocks" link which also worked. I'm quite sure the icon wasn't active before, I had to edit the subscription list manually. Not sure what's happening, sorry.

[honzajavorek]

This has got a bit worse by the fact YouTube has introduced handles for channels. Adding e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@DreamPrague now involves quite some manual labor to find out the ID as it's not in the URL anymore. It would be awesome if NetNewsWire supported magically constructing the RSS links out of the box if given the channel URL.