What is an RSS feed for a YouTube channel?

An RSS feed is a machine-readable list of recent items from a website that feed readers can poll for updates. YouTube publishes one for every channel and playlist as an Atom feed at https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml, accepting either a channel_id, a playlist_id, or a legacy user parameter. Subscribing to that URL in a feed reader lets you follow a channel without an account, without notifications, and without the YouTube homepage algorithm.

The link is not exposed in YouTube's UI, but it is embedded in the channel page's HTML as a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> tag, which is why most feed readers can auto-discover it from a channel URL. The feed contains roughly the latest 15 uploads with title, publish date, description, thumbnail, and view/like counts.

Tool description

This tool builds the correct YouTube Atom/RSS feed URL from whatever you paste — a full channel URL, a bare channel ID (UC…), a playlist URL or ID, a legacy /user/ URL, or an existing feeds/videos.xml link. It also lets you swap the default channel feed (which mixes long videos, Shorts, and live streams) for filtered variants that surface only the content type you actually want to read.

Examples

Input Output
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw
UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw (filter: Long-form only) https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmRdnEQy6nuLMt9H1tK7nTqQ4cYbk https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLrAXtmRdnEQy6nuLMt9H1tK7nTqQ4cYbk

Features

  • Accepts channel URLs, channel IDs, playlist URLs, playlist IDs, /user/ URLs, and existing feed URLs
  • Optional filters to exclude YouTube Shorts and live streams from the feed
  • Generates a ready-to-paste <link rel="alternate"> HTML snippet for embedding feed discovery in your own site
  • One-click "Open in feed reader" via the standard feeds/videos.xml URL
  • Detects @handle URLs and warns you that they cannot be resolved without YouTube's API

Use cases

  • Subscribing to a creator in a self-hosted feed reader (Miniflux, FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, NetNewsWire) without YouTube notifications or recommendations
  • Filtering a noisy channel down to long-form uploads only, so YouTube Shorts and live streams stop flooding your reading list
  • Adding a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> tag to a personal site that links out to favorite channels, so visitors' browsers and readers can auto-discover the feed

How it works

For a channel feed, YouTube exposes the documented form feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC…. To filter content type, the tool uses an undocumented but widely used trick: every channel automatically owns a set of generated playlists whose IDs are derived from the channel ID by replacing the leading UC with a different prefix.

Filter Playlist ID prefix Contents
All videos UC… (channel feed) Long-form videos, Shorts, and live streams mixed
Long-form only UULF… Regular long-form videos only — no Shorts, no live
Shorts only UUSH… Shorts only
Live streams only UULV… Live broadcasts only

So for a channel UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw, the long-form-only feed is feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw. These prefixes were reverse-engineered by the community and are not officially announced by YouTube.

Options explained

  • YouTube channel or playlist — Paste any of: a channel URL (/channel/UC…), a channel ID (UC…), a playlist URL (with ?list=…), a bare playlist ID (PL…, UU…, FL…, …), a legacy /user/NAME URL, an @handle URL (will warn — see Limitations), or an existing feeds/videos.xml URL.
  • Filter — Only meaningful for channel inputs. Switches between the official channel_id feed and the UULF / UUSH / UULV derived playlist feeds. For playlist or user inputs the filter is ignored because the underlying feed is already a fixed list.

Limitations

  • @handle URLs cannot be converted directly. YouTube's public page does not contain a stable mapping from handle to channel ID without scraping. Open the channel in a browser, view the page source, and copy the UC… ID — or use the channel's /channel/UC… URL.
  • Shorts/long/live filtering only works for channels (because it relies on the derived playlist IDs). For playlist inputs every item in the playlist is included regardless of length.
  • The UULF, UUSH, and UULV prefixes are not documented by YouTube and could disappear without notice.
  • YouTube feeds list only the latest ~15 items and the service is occasionally rate-limited or temporarily unavailable; this is a YouTube limitation, not the tool's.
  • Private, members-only, and unlisted videos are not included in feeds.

Tips

  • Keep the Long-form only filter selected by default — most "Shorts polluting my feed reader" complaints disappear instantly with UULF….
  • If your feed reader supports per-feed rules, you can keep the All videos feed and instead filter URLs containing /shorts/ to mark them read automatically.
  • To embed feed discovery on your own page, copy the generated <link rel="alternate"> snippet into the <head> of the relevant HTML page.

FAQ

Why isn't the YouTube subscribe button enough? The bell only sends notifications inside YouTube/Google. An RSS feed lets any feed reader, email-to-RSS bridge, or automation tool consume the same updates without a YouTube account.

Will Shorts still appear in the long-form feed? The UULF playlist is YouTube's own "long-form videos" auto-playlist for the channel, so Shorts should be excluded. A small number of borderline videos (vertical clips at the edge of YouTube's Shorts threshold) may occasionally slip through.

Are these feeds RSS or Atom? Atom 1.0, despite YouTube labelling them with application/rss+xml in the <link> tag. Every modern feed reader handles both formats transparently.

Can I get a feed for my own subscriptions or watch later? Not via this tool — those require authentication and are not exposed as public XML feeds.