invidious/piped to newsboat

Extracting youtube subscriptions from piped and invidious accounts and using the newsboat rss reader and mpv (and yt-dlp) to play videos.

You need newsboat, mpv, yt-dlp

This guide only makes sense, if you have an account on an invidious or piped instance that you use to subscribe to channels. Log in to your instance and do the following (obviously replace the urls):

invidious export

go to https://invidious.instance/preferences/
Select import/export data
Export Invidious data as OPML
you now have: subscription_manager

piped export

go to https://piped.instance/subscriptions
Export to JSON
you now have: subscriptions.json

Install newsboat. Make sure ~/.newsboat/ directory exists.

export and convert the urls from invidious (opml)

Parse the opml file - you have to extract the youtube urls and convert them to a new syntax. (Previously you could feed your rss reader with the direct url to a youtube channel, not anymore.)

$ cat subscription_manager | tr ">" "\n" | grep http | cut -d '"' -f8 |\
cut -d "/" -f4- |\
sed 's/feed\/channel\//https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/feeds\/videos.xml?channel_id=/g' >> ~/.newsboat/urls

export and convert the urls from piped (json)

Parse the json file.

$ cat subscriptions.json | tr "{" "\n" | cut -d '"' -f4 |\
sed 's/channel\//feeds\/videos.xml?channel_id=/g' >> ~/.newsboat/urls

configure newsboat

Edit ~/.newsboat/config. This is the bare minimum. Opening a link will stream the selected video through mpv+yt-dlp and the feeds will be sorted chronologically according to the date of the last video on the channel.

#~/.newsboat/config
browser mpv
feed-sort-order lastupdated

Run newsboat and press Shift+R to refresh all the feeds. Done. Select a channel, select a video and press 'o'. After a short while mpv will start playing the video.

If you already use newsboat

...and don't want to polute your urls file with youtube channels, consider saving the file with channel urls to a separate file, ie: ~/.newsboat/youtube. Similarly you can create a separate configuration file to use just when viewing youtube feeds. ie: ~/.newsboat/yt-config.

You would then run

$ newsboat -u ~/.newsboat/youtube -C ~/.newsboat/yt-config

You could alias the previous to something like `newsboat-yt'.

extra

By default, mpv/yt-dlp will stream the video in the highest available quality. For the sake of old machines and bandwidth, you can define yt-dlp options for mpv in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf. The following will stream youtube videos at 420p.

#~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
ytdl-format="bestvideo[height<=?420]+bestaudio[height<=?420]"

Have fun. Or maybe stop using youtube altogether.

[fediverse] mostlypat of patpatpat.xyz wrote a program to get youtube rss urls by simply typing the youtube channel's name, it comes in either a perl or python flavor:

[fediverse] Hund of hunden.linuxkompis.se wrote several articles in a similar minimalistic youtube watching vein: