Category Archives: YouTube

How to Get RSS Feeds For All Your YouTube Subscriptions

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Update January 21, 2023: Suppose I should mention that this no longer works and probably hasn’t for some time. Looks like they removed the Export to RSS Readers option (boo!). The individual YouTube channels do still have RSS Feed links in them and RSS feed detection extensions in browsers should detect them (RSSPreview for Firefox does). Might need to refresh the channel page for them to see the correct one.

This is a follow-up to my post How to Get a YouTube Channel’s RSS Feed. I actually stumbled onto this by accident (by clicking on the red SUBSCRIPTIONS link in the left-hand menu it would seem). You need to go to https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager on YouTube and at the bottom you will see Export to RSS readers with an Export subscriptions button on the right. After clicking the button it will download a XML file to your system.

Next, if you happen to be using Feedly, you can now import all of your YouTube RSS feeds at once by going to the Organize Sources section which should be at https://feedly.com/i/organize and clicking the Import OPML button on the top-right and selecting the XML file you just downloaded from YouTube. There you go! 🙂 Other RSS readers should have a similar import mechanism. Hope this helped someone.

How to Get a YouTube Channel’s RSS Feed

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Well, I was trying add the PBS Space Time YouTube channel’s RSS feed to my reader like I’ve done with other channels in the past; however, the browser was never detecting the feed and it has seemed problematic with YouTube for sometime. Actually, when I examined the source code, I could not find any reference to a feed for the browser to detect.  So, here’s what I did.

I found a working feed which had a URL like:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=(channel-id)

I then replaced (channel-id) with the one for PBS Space Time which happens to be

UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

so the complete URL would be:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

You can find the channel id by looking at the address bar in your browser when looking a the channel’s home. Example:

PBS Space Time channel ID in the browser's address bar.It worked! Hope this helps someone. 🙂

Update September 18, 2016: You can also use the user name that shows in the address bar if it doesn’t have a channel ID. Use user=username to specify the RSS feed. In this case a URL would be like:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=periodicvideos

Update April 4, 2017: I found out from here that for a YouTube playlist, use playlist_id. So, for my music video playlist, the URL would be:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL8D8D4240EC972114

Update September 5, 2017: Check out my new post: How to Get RSS Feeds For All Your YouTube Subscriptions that describes how to import all your YouTube subscription RSS feeds at once.