If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I’m a very happy user of elfeed for my RSS needs. It’s easy, fast, and, of course, I can read my feeds from within Emacs. Just the other day, I was wishing that there were some way of adding my YouTube subscriptions to elfeed. As things stand now, I have to check each of the channels everyday. Yes, I know that Google will send me a notification of new videos but I’ve stopped using Gmail for the obvious reasons and only check it once a month. I should probably just forward it to one of my active accounts.
Over at Codingquark, Dhavan Vaidya shows how to add those YouTube subscriptions to elfeed and download the videos. I briefly thought about doing this but I didn’t know that you could export your subscriptions from YouTube so I couldn’t figure out where to look for new videos. Vaidya has all that handled and it turns out to be very easy to set up.
All you need is youtube_dl and, of course, elfeed. Add a little bit of Elisp to your init.el, export your subscriptions from YouTube, and you’re set to go. I’m really happy about this; it’s one more function absorbed into Emacs.