My favorite internet video publisher, RoosterTeeth (and their sister Achievement Hunter) recently launched a new YouTube channel, LetsPlay, dedicated to their LetsPlay series of videos. Unfortunately, I quickly got behind on the videos, and wanted to catch up. Having 80 videos published to their channel already, I wished to somehow subscribe to the channel in an RSS Aggregator to manage viewing the videos in order.
I found that YouTube offered a channel RSS feed, formatted as such for LetsPlay:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/LetsPlay/uploads
However, this only shows the most recent videos. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any offered feed that contained all of the videos.
I decided to make my own feed. Using Google’s API, I was able to generate a list of all of the videos from the channel. Simple enough, now I just had to generate the RSS Feed.
As much as I love Perl, Google provides their API Client Library in Python, and sure enough, an easy-to-use Python module was available to generate RSS XML Files
The result was YtChannelRss:
https://github.com/tonyborries/YtChannelRss
A single execution builds an RSS feed of all current videos. By subscribing to this static file, and YouTube’s RSS feed, I was able to get a list of all videos. As I catch up on the videos from this static list, the YouTube provided feed will keep up with the new videos… success.
Bash |copy code |?
01 02 # ./YtChannelRss.py -h03 04 05 -h, --help Show this usage message and exit.06 -v, --verbose Verbose Output to StdErr07 -k, --apikey YouTube API Key08 09 10 # ./YtChannelRss.py -v -k "Google-API-Key" -c LetsPlay > /var/www/html/LetsPlay.xml11 12 13 14 Found 81 Videos15 Found 1 Channels16 Found 20 Playlists17 Building RSS with 81 Items18