RSS Feeds

YouTube RSS feeds

YouTube already offers feeds for its channels, but they're rather limiting and Google can see which videos you're watching when you use them (if you care). So we've implemented our own alternative version of the feeds with a few added improvements.

  • Shorts are automatically excluded (but available in a separate feed)
  • Embedded tracking links are removed
  • Feeds for YouTube searches are supported
  • Upcoming/Premiere content can be easily filtered out
https://openrss.org/youtube.com/mozilla

Video feed

YouTube already offers a feed for channels, but they can be difficult to find on the YouTube website and also include Shorts. If you're looking for an easy-to-use, privacy-focused feed for a user's channel that doesn't include shorts, here's how to get one.

  1. Go to any user's channel page on youtube.com.
  2. Click on the "Videos" tab.
  3. While on the page, add openrss.org/ at the beginning of the URL of the page in your browser bar.
  4. Navigate to the updated URL to generate the feed.
  5. Add the feed to your reader app.
A video showing a youtube video page, openrss.org being added to the browser bar, and a feed showing after clicking enter

Upcoming Premiere Filters

Instead of uploading an actual video, sometimes YouTube creators will start a YouTube Premiere, which is just a placeholder for the video that hasn't yet been uploaded. They're usually tagged with the word "Upcoming" on the YouTube website and will appear in YouTube feeds by default. But we've prefixed these items in the feed with UPCOMING: which allows you to filter them out in your feed reader if necessary.

Shorts feed

By design, the YouTube video feeds mentioned above won't contain shorts. If you'd like a feed of only a YouTube user's Shorts, here's how to get it.

  1. Go to any user's page on youtube.com.
  2. Click on the "Shorts" section.
  3. While on the page, add openrss.org/ at the beginning of the URL of the page in your browser bar.
  4. Navigate to the updated URL to generate the feed.
  5. Add the feed to your reader app.

Search results feed

You can get a feed of items that match any search term across YouTube with the following steps.

  1. Go to youtube.com.
  2. Perform a search by typing a search term in the search field.
  3. While on the page, add openrss.org/ at the beginning of the URL of the page in your browser bar.
  4. Navigate to the updated URL to generate the feed.
  5. Add the feed to your reader app.

Playlist feed

If there's a playlist you enjoy, there's a feed for it.

  1. Navigate to the playlist you want to follow (e.g. youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAl4aZK3mRv0Uw8ja75puTv8yPWYTdErj).
  2. While on the page, add openrss.org/ at the beginning of the URL of the page in your browser bar.
  3. Navigate to the updated URL to generate the feed.
  4. Add the feed to your reader app.

Limitations

To preserve resources and keep the experience great for everyone, using YouTube feeds does have some limitations.

  • To avoid overloading YouTube's servers, feeds are not always updated with new content in real-time, so they shouldn't be relied on for time-sensitive tasks or used as a replacement for real-time notifications.
  • The content in YouTube feeds is restricted to only the most recently uploaded content and doesn't show old content in a user's history.
  • The content in a feed will only update if the feed is in use.

You can learn more about the frequency at which feeds update with new content in our How Open RSS feeds work guide.

YouTube's feeds

Even though Open RSS provides more enhanced YouTube feeds, you can always get a feed for a channel directly from the YouTube website if you'd like. They're just hidden, so they're a little harder to find.

To get a channel's feed from YouTube directly:

  1. Go to any user's channel page on youtube.com.
  2. Right-click to inspect the HTML on the page.
  3. Find the <link> tag with the application/rss+xml identifier.
  4. Copy the href value of the <link> tag, which is the feed URL. The beginning of it should look similar to https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= .
  5. Paste the copied href value in a new tab in your web browser.
  6. Click Go or Enter to navigate to the URL.

To avoid having to do these steps for every YouTube feed, there are several browser extensions you can install that will auto-detect YouTube's feeds and do these steps automatically for you while on the website.


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.