Martijn has Bear

The RSS World of YouTube

I wrote about how I grab YouTube channel RSS feeds using yt-dlp. But that is only part of what exists as far as YouTube feeds go. Let me tell you about some more.

Most resources will tell you to find the channel ID (much as I do with yt-dlp) and use the URL https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= with it to grab a feed of the channel. But that is only one of the options. If you do not have the channel ID, but do know the channel’s user name, that will work too! Instead of setting ?channel_id= on the URL you can use ?user=.

Throughout the years, YouTube has offered a bunch of different URL styles. The current prevailing one seems to be youtube.com/@YouTube. The final part prefixed with @ is the channel owner’s handle. This handle can be used to grab the feed as well:

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

(Other URLs for the exact same channel include youtube.com/c/YouTube and youtube.com/user/YouTube. Try it with your own handle!)

This means you can still subscribe to a channel even without discovering the channel ID. But of course only for channels that have handles. And only as long as they do not change the handle. So maybe keep detecting the channel ID.

So now we know that YouTube’s channel ID is UCBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ. Through some form of detection. Or maybe the easiest way: we opened the previous user-based feed and read it straight from the author uri.

But the feed is (as of 2025-06-04) only shorts. Can we do better?

There is one more feed type apart from ?channel_id= and ?user=. We can also create feeds with ?playlist_id=. These are very straight forward: find your favourite playlist and copy the URL, then take the ID part that starts with PL (for playlist).

To get around having a feed full of shorts, we just need to grab a playlist that only contains videos. YouTube helps us out here by creating dynamic playlists.

Take the channel ID and replace the first two letters UC (user channel, perhaps?) with UU (for user uploads, maybe?):

UCBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ → UUBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ

Now lets try to visit that as a playlist on YouTube. It is an actual playlist called “Uploads from YouTube”! We can get this same playlist as a feed:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UUBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ

We still have the same problem. Uploads include shorts. But there are a bunch more automatically generated playlists that you can visit on YouTube and subscribe to the feed for:

  1. Use the prefix UULF for all long form videos: Videos by YouTube.
  2. Use the prefix UUSH for all shorts: Short videos by YouTube.
  3. Use the prefix UULV for all live streams: Live streams by YouTube.

Any of these playlist IDs can be used with the ?playlist_id= parameter for a YouTube videos feed. Subscribing to only videos by YouTube can be done by plopping the following URL into my reader:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFBR8-60-B28hp2BmDPdntcQ

One more tip to round it of: there is also the prefix UUMF for videos limited to channel members. @YouTube does not have any of these, but see this example from Dropout. This is a simple way to catch up on videos from a channel you have just become a member of, but also a very nice link to point your favourite archiving tool at *cough*.

A bunch of these prefixes have circulated on different websites. Especially the UUMF one. Quick hat tip to Robert Wesner who has collected them all in one document. If you know of any more prefixes, please let him know over on GitHub. It looks like we might have discovered TLPQ just this week.