In the mornings I like to watch my favourite video podcasts while I eat breakfast. I use gPodder to aggregate my video podcast feeds and then I watch them using SageTV or XBMC/Kodi. But this morning I had a surprise. Instead of my weekly “The Ben Heck Show” episode, I was provided with a silent movie from Google, telling me my “device” was basically too old.
A quick gPodder update check showed I had the latest version. Not a good sign of things to come! A little research told me that April 20, 2015, was the last day of the old YouTube API. They have a new YouTube API starting today. I personally wasn’t aware of this, and apparently neither were the developers of gPodder.
I’ve only been using gPodder for a short time, several months perhaps, and I switched to gPodder for the YouTube support. Not long ago, The Ben Heck Show had changed it’s media delivery system to YouTube only. So the reason I started using gPodder, is also the reason it is now a problem for me.
I suppose I have 3 options; patiently wait to see if the gPodder team update the app, find a podcast aggregator that is keeping up YouTube support, or give up on The Ben Heck Show cause it’s been a real pain in the ass jumping through hoops to watch it, now that it’s only on YouTube.
EDIT: 2015-05-21
For anyone that might be interested in this topic, my gPodder bug ticket (and a duplicate from another user) was finally looked at and has been marked as resolved. As I understand it, it’s basically the same as my workaround. That being to use a newer updated YouTube URL as the link to the feed. This was brought to my attention by a commenter, and those notes can be read in the comments of this post.
Here is the resolution:
https://bugs.gpodder.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1999 Thomas Perl <thp@gpodder.org> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Resolution|--- |FIXED Status|IN_PROGRESS |RESOLVED --- Comment #3 from Thomas Perl <thp@gpodder.org> --- This has been fixed in Git here: http://gpodder.org/commit/fd100206 The user is required to enter their own V3 API key, then YouTube feeds can be resolved. In the Gtk UI, there is also an "Extras" menu item that can be used to migrate all existing subscriptions.
That’s right, when you think you’ve finally found exactly what you need, there is a “seismic shift” and you’re empty handed again! I switched to gpodder from Miro a few months back as the latter was too bulky for my taste and pretty soon I found that some of the “channels” on youtube were skipping and giiving Error 403 on some of the videos (mind you only some). I’ve searched high and low and the best I could do so far was to rely on ClipGrab (www.clipgrab.de) to manually download what gpodder didn’t. I’ve tried the Google RSS feed support file (which I manually had to rename), but I was unable to make it work either. Ted talks still download like before, CinemaSins also, BrandSins doesn’t. Go figure (and let me know)
Thanks for the comment Marco.
I did go to the trouble of filing a bug ticket with the gPodder dev team. No reply so far, and it doesn’t look as if it’s been looked at yet, as it is still marked as unconfirmed. My gut feeling is that it won’t get fixed anytime soon. If you write an app that works with YouTube, and that API changed, I would have expected an app that was being actively developed to get updated, or at least fixed when that functionality ends. According to the Google statement, that was yesterday. Since that didn’t happen, I’m guessing gPodder is not actively being maintained, and won’t be updated to resolve this soon. There were numerous gPodder updates the last few months of last year, and none in 2015 so far.
It’s very disappointing, considering how hard it is to find a podcast downloader that includes YouTube. I’ve also used Miro, and feel the same way, bloated and a resource hog.
If and when the gPodder dev team releases an update that works with the new YouTube API, I will post an update here.
I think the issue is that youtube changed the url for their RSS feeds.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/339idg/youtube_just_dropped_its_support_for_rssatom_feeds/
I think you just have to go through each subscription and re-add using the new URL. It sucks if you have a lot of subscriptions and you lose your episode history for each subscription.
Thanks for the comment Brian. That concept seems to be the solution. I may have wrongly assumed that Google announcing that they changed the YouTube API, meant that the apps had to allow for new feed content formatting. I did manage to get gPodder to work with a URL in this format:
http://youtube.com/user/channelname/feed
Example for The Ben Heck Show channel:
http://youtube.com/user/thebenheckshow/feed
OR
https://www.youtube.com/user/thebenheckshow/feed
This is basically the URL of the channel you see in the browser address bar, you simply add “/feed” without quotes to the end. Much simpler than the previous URL format that I was using before that looked like this:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/channelname/uploads
As an update to my bug ticket in the gPodder Bug Tracker system, still no reply, the ticket is still unconfirmed, and there appears to be little to no activity for a while in their Bug Tracker system. I see now that someone created a similar YouTube API ticket and uploaded the video that Google sends out when people try using the old format to access feeds. That ticket was added the same day as my complaint. Sad to see so little activity on the project. Hopefully this feed format URL will continue to work on gPodder.
Yeah, I converted everything to this format:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
I’m a little worried that this might change again soon and I’ll have to go through this all over. It sucks relying on solutions that have so little support because it can all blow up at a moments notice like this.
My solution relies on YouTube feeds, gPodder, Dropbox, ifttt, WordPress, and FeedBurner. I had to create Visio diagrams just to keep track of it all! Any time anything changes in any of those services it creates a ton of work for me. But, being able to watch youtube subscriptions at 2x speed on Downcast on my iPad is worth all of the continued effort.
I do the same thing with several over-the-air TV recordings so I can watch them through Downcast, too.
Thanks for sharing the URL that you use to accommodate this issue. It’s great to have alternatives.
You have quite the interesting setup in your video solution. I thought mine was complicated, but I think yours may have me beat.
Google is well known for changing or killing off any service that doesn’t make them money directly. And obviously us preferring RSS feeds to see the content, which won’t contain their ads, will have the possibility of being changed or removed with little or no notice. I’m all for any company making money, but when they get to the size of Google, they can easily afford to leave these little used services alone if they aren’t being abused. But easy for me to say, I don’t have the share holders to answer to. 🙂
I have to thank you for the efforts you have put in penning this website.
I really hope to view the same high-grade content from you in the future as well.
In truth, your creative writing abilities has motivated me
to get my own, personal site now 😉
It’s actuɑlpy a ǥreat and uѕeful piece of info.
I am satisfied that you juѕt shared this һelpful info with
us. Please stay us informed likme this. Thannkѕ for sharing.