Hacker News Reader

Comment by getoffmyyawn | Hacker News Reader

I agree 100%. The defining characteristic of a podcast is how it is distributed. Otherwise it's just an audio program. However, we are losing the word already. The least technical people I know think "podcast" means any kind of audio program with talking.

As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

View on HN

every youtube channel has a RSS feed though. see it with: `curl --silent 'https://www.youtube.com/@Channel5YouTube' | grep -o 'href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/[^"]*"'`

your podcast app should be able to subscribe to a Youtube channel. Youtube links that feed as a recognizable `<link rel=...>` tag, so even if your app doesn't index Youtube you should be able to just paste that 'youtube.com/@MyChannelName` URL into it and it'll figure out the actual feed URL from that.

Until Google decides to remove RSS from YouTube.

maybe. i'm fairly certain they artificially restrict the bandwidth for consumers of the feed already, maybe as an incentive to get you to use the app instead. at which point, who's actually using those RSS feeds except for the super opinionated nerds who would legitimately stop using the platform if Youtube were to remove it?

those RSS feeds have been there for _ages_. i don't see their incentive to change it, unless maybe some competitor decides to scrape it and abuse it in some way which materially harms them.

There are no audio files in that RSS, so how would podcast apps be able to do anything with it (unless they reverse engineer Youtube's non-public player API)?

huh, it does look like the content in my feed is delayed by about a week. that feed has tags like `<media:content url="https://www.youtube.com/v/2dQ4-VNaG3s?version=3" ...>`. that URL, like you said, isn't an audio file: it's a webpage which includes some json payload `var ytInitialPlayerResponse = ...`. within that payload is several `url` options, classified by quality. you can straight-up `curl` or `wget` those URLs, though they are IP locked.

i guess "reverse engineering Youtube's non-public player API" is that simple for the older videos in the feed? but the newer videos seem to be DRM-encumbered, so if the delayed feed bothers you, that's what yt-dlp is for, right?

FWIW i just gave my podcast client that feed URL and it worked exactly the same as any other RSS feed (except that the entries were delayed): i didn't know it was doing anything special behind the scenes. sure, it's non-standard, but that's not the only non-standard thing podcast apps already have to support. not everyone includes the right `<link rel="feed" ...>` tag on their website, yet for podcasts that do have their own website you can still paste their domain name and your app will magically figure out where the feed is.

gPodder's got an option to use yt-dlp instead of the above method, so i'll toggle that and see how well it works.

That's really what it is to me too, and I'd consider myself pretty technical: A podcast is what I can listen to in the gym or on my bike without missing anything important on the video.

The only difference to an audiobook is that Podcasts are usually free and often (but not always) in serial format, but these boundaries are blurring more and more.

That said, I do definitely prefer open RSS distribution than something like "Youtube for Audio", and I'm glad there isn't any such thing (yet), but I wouldn't not call a podcast exclusive to Spotify, Apple etc. "not a podcast", just an annoyingly-distributed podcast.

> A podcast is what I can listen to in the gym or on my bike without missing anything important on the video.

If I were listening to a talk show on a pocket FM radio while in the gym, would you call that a podcast? What about a an audiobook on a cd player? How about a 30 minute audio recording my wife made to encourage me that I saved in my phone? If not, why not?

> As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

That's always worth a laugh. But I have seen actual podcasts that did this, too. They have a real audio podcast, but also put up a YouTube video of them making the podcast.

You have to serve all the channels.

Do it live on Twitch. Publish video recording on Youtube. Audio as podcast. Transcript as blog/newsletter. Short snippets on Tiktok. Images with quotes on Instagram...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com