As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Elfeed. It’s made reading my feeds a breeze, works just the way I want it to, and, of course, runs inside Emacs. You probably also know that I’m not a Google fan and even though there are several YouTube series that I follow, I don’t like to subscribe to them and expose my interests to Google’s advertising behemoth.
Josh Rollins has a nice post on Elfeed that describes how to track YouTube channels without subscribing. That’s handy for the same reason it’s handy with blogs and other feeds: you don’t have to check in everyday with your YouTube channels. You just add them to Elfeed and let it notify when there’s something new you may want to watch.
Privacy is enhanced because you’re not running in your browser. Rollins uses MPV to view the videos but you can use whatever you want; you’ll just have to adjust the Elisp that he describes. His rendition is derived from one by Noonker.
If you’re an Emacser and read RSS feeds, you should definitely be using Elfeed. I’ve said that every since I started using it but now that I know you can also use it to keep track of YouTube videos I’m going to double down on that recommendation.