YouTube RSS Feeds

[Boolah]

Since I don't know the first thing about modifying SageTV with Studio, I thought I'd work around the YouTube RSS feed changes outside of SageTV. I've setup a web site where you provide the YouTube URL of the user/channel/playlist you want and the site will return a SageTV-compatible RSS feed.

If you want to try it out, change the URLContext line in your CustomOnlineVideoLinks.properties file to this format:

URLContext=http://stv-yt2rss.pw/?url=<YouTube URL>

Where "<YouTube URL>" is the YouTube URL to the user/channel's video or playlist link. You can get this link by clicking on the "Videos" or "Playlists" link from the YouTube user/channel page.

For example, Hak5's main YouTube page is "https://www.youtube.com/user/Hak5Darren". Clicking on the "Videos" link gives this URL "https://www.youtube.com/user/Hak5Darren/videos". To get this RSS feed, you would then modify your URLContext line to read:

URLContext=http://stv-yt2rss.pw/?url=https://www.youtube.com/user/Hak5Darren/videos

Similarly, if you only wanted the Threat Wire playlist from the Hak5 channel, you would click on the "Playlists" link from the Hak5 main page, click on the "View full playlist" link under the Threat Wire playlist and use the resulting URL in your URLContext line:

URLContext=http://stv-yt2rss.pw/?url=https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5y1tjAOzI0Sx4UU2fncEwQ9BQLr5Vlu

I only just got this setup, so there may still be some bugs with it. Hope the community finds this useful until a real developer can fix YouTube in SageTV!

[Rob23]

Thank you Boolah. This sounds like a good potential solution to lates API. I plan to try it this week. I appreciate your efforts on this front.

[MrE]

Wow! It works great! I can get my TekThing and ScreenJunkies youtube channels again.


Question: Are the video publish dates showing in a different language for anyone else?

[Boolah]

Can you provide a URL to a channel that's showing the publish dates in a different language (and a screenshot from Sage might be helpful too)?

[MrE]

Tekthing:

http://stv-yt2rss.pw/?url=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6sWaC11f4mxnizvOroOvkQ/videos

Movie Clips Trailers:

http://stv-yt2rss.pw/?url=https://www.youtube.com/MovieclipsTrailers/videos

If I look at the source code of the RSS pages generated by the above url's, the "<pubdate>" tags are a different language.

SageTV screenshots attached.

[Boolah]

Thanks for the screenshots and URLs. This was caused by an unset language variable, which should now be fixed. If anyone finds any other strange happenings, please let me know.

[Boolah]

YouTube searches should work using this method now too. To get searches working from SageTV, edit the OnlineVideoLinks.properties file. Search for a line which looks like this:

xYouTube/URLPrefix=http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/

and replace it with this:

xYouTube/URLPrefix=http://stv-yt2rss.pw/

Further down the same file, search for two lines which look like this:

xSearchYouTubeTags/URLSearchPrefix=videos?q=
xSearchYouTubeTags/URLSearchPostfix=&client=ytapi-youtube-search&v=2&alt=rss&max-results=20

and replace them with this:

xSearchYouTubeTags/URLSearchPrefix=?url=
xSearchYouTubeTags/URLSearchPostfix=

Save the file and YouTube searching should work from Sage again!

[wubdich]

Everything is working great - thank you very much !

[EdwardATeller]

Followed the directions from the post two up from here, and when I search for a YouTube video, nothing comes up. I think I'm missing something very basic.

[Boolah]

If when you search for something, you get no result at all, then the search is not even reaching my site. This means that something is wrong with this line:

xYouTube/URLPrefix=http://stv-yt2rss.pw/

Note the domain is a ".pw" and not a ".com" and ends with a "/".

On the other hand, if you're only getting a single entry with a 404 image and the text which reads "Malformed or missing URL/search terms provided", then there is either something wrong with this line:

xSearchYouTubeTags/URLSearchPrefix=?url=

or there's a bug which I need to track down (make sure you have a tailing "=" at the end of this line). Check those two lines again and make sure you're editing your OnlineVideoLinks.properties file and not your CustomOnlineVideoLinks.properties file. (The former file is for YouTube searches, while the latter is for YouTube channels.) Also, the "Most Viewed", "Top Rated", "Top Favorites", etc. will not work as those feeds don't exist with YouTube's v3 API.

If you're still having problems, PM me your IP address and I'll search the server logs to see if you're even hitting the site.

[Boolah]

As of today, this fix no longer works. For details, please see this post. If anything changes, I'll update this thread.