Browse YouTube with Open RSS feeds

You may know that YouTube already offers RSS feeds. But we've implemented an alternative version with some improvements. Here's the Open RSS feed for the Mozilla YouTube channel, for example.

https://openrss.org/youtube.com/mozilla

You can get an RSS feed for any YouTube user, by simply going to any YouTube channel page, adding openrss.org/ in front of the URL in your browser bar and navigating to the updated URL in your web browser.

A video showing a youtube video page, openrss.org being added to the browser bar, and an RSS feed page showing after clicking enter

You can even generate a YouTube RSS feed for a user right from the page of a video. Just add openrss.org/ in front of the URL while on a video page.

Finding a YouTube feed isn't easy

Knowing how to find an RSS feed for a YouTube channel can be a challenge. You have to:

  1. First, navigate to a YouTube channel page.
  2. Right click to inspect the HTML on the page.
  3. Find the <link> tag with the application/rss+xml type identifier.
  4. Copy the href value of the <link> tag, which is the RSS Feed URL. The beginning of it should look similar to https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= .
  5. Paste the copied URL in a new tab.
  6. Navigate to the URL.

While you can cut down on the number of steps by installing a browser extension that can automate these steps, finding an RSS feed for a website shouldn't require so much effort or manual adjustments to a web browser.

YouTube feeds without the tracking

YouTube injects their video link directly in its RSS feeds in a way that will cause some RSS Readers to automatically embed the YouTube video directly into your RSS Reader. When the embed is loaded—even if it's not played—YouTube can still detect information about your device. However, Open RSS feeds are free of any video embed links, preventing YouTube from tracking you.

Continued support

YouTube's own RSS feeds have been known to cause intermittent errors in RSS readers and applications. Often times, these issues will resolve on their own, but not having access to the feed at random times can be a frustrating experience.

Additionally, YouTube doesn't offer any individual support for issues with its RSS feeds, which doesn't establish much confidence that they'll continue to be around in a few years. However, Open RSS will continue to work to ensure that YouTube RSS feeds will always be available.


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Open RSS is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in the District of Columbia, USA and funded only by voluntary donations of its users. If you enjoy using Open RSS, we'd be so grateful if you'd consider donating to help us grow and continue to provide you with a quality and reliable service.