Monday, April 6, 2015

Podcasting from youtube

I listen to a lot of podcast.  Generally, however, I only listen to them when I'm driving or working out.

Some of the ones I enjoy also have youtube channels (or are they youtubers that also have podcasts?). 

I also enjoy a couple people who put everything they do up on youtube and don't have a podcast stream at all. so I never get a chance to listen to their stuff, unless I rip it from youtube on my computer, translate it to audio only, then upload it to my phone using a cable.  It's sort of a pain so for the most part I just end up not doing it.

From Lifehacker comes this tip.

Subscribe to the Channel's Hidden RSS Feed

Most YouTube channels have RSS feeds. I've seen a number of channel owners say that you "can't subscribe via RSS, but you can subscribe to the channel via YouTube," mostly because YouTube doesn't exactly publicize the fact that every channel has a feed. The URL is usually something like this:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/xxxx/uploads
Just replace the "xxxx" with the name of the YouTube user (for example. the Lifehacker channel is just "lifehacker") and you have an RSS feed with the latest uploads, ready to add to whatever podcast manager or feed reader you use. As long as your feed reader can understand video, or your podcast catcher accepts RSS, this works like a charm.

Which is great except that apparently youtube's service agreement says that you can't write an app that grabs a youtube stream unless it always runs the video.  In other words, no screen shutoff.  For some reason they don't want you to just listen to the audio.

This is a bit frustrating to me since it is the screen that sucks down the battery on my phone.  I'd love to just listen to what these people have to say, and I have no interest in watching them say it.  Some of them (Chris Bechtloff for example) don't even have video, just an image that shows during the whole podcast.  These people are using  youtube to distribute and publicize a podcast but youtube does not have a provision to allow people to just listen.

I don't really get it.  Seems like youtube is missing out here.  They could still have people hearing the advertising, still have hits on the website, but use less bandwidth by allowing people to listen to stations without streaming the video.  Obviously there is something that I don't know about their business model (other than just that the they are a video streaming service) which would keep them from making money if people didn't have the video turned on.

Meanwhile I just have to be careful to have my phone plugged in if I am going to listen to any of the youtube streams.

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