You’re probably aware of the subscriptions feature in YouTube. It allows you to ‘subscribe’ to users (or channels) who’s videos you enjoy. This means when you sign into YouTube you’ll get a list of videos updated by the users or channels you’re subscribed to.
This is great but unfortunately YouTube doesn’t provide any other subscription update notification systems besides logging into the site itself. For someone like me who doesn’t like to visit sites without a particular goal in mind this is annoying to say the least. I’d much rather know there is a new video I care about before visiting YouTube.
At first I thought YouTube simply didn’t support syndication of any kind. However; with a little bit of searching I found they have a whole list of different types of RSS feeds that are available. You can create an RSS feed for anything from a ‘tag search’ to the ‘Top Rated videos.’ They don’t yet have a way to create an RSS feed of your subscriptions. That’s where I come in.
I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to do things in the past but most of them were very custom and not usable to anyone but myself without quite a bit of effort. This time around I thought I’d make one that’s parameterizable to allow anyone to build an RSS feed of their subscriptions. I have created a pipe that does just that. You simply provide your username and the number of videos you want displayed in the feed. The Pipe does the rest and you can subscribe to it using any feed reader you’d like.
I’ve published it on Yahoo Pipes public page and you can now use it as well. So check it out and let me know what you think!
Randy Aldrich 
I tried using this finally, but it appears the pipe has some issues:
This Pipe ran successfully but encountered some problems:
warning Could not determine type for ‘pubDate’, using ‘text’ sort.
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I took a look. Assuming you’re using the youtube username of ‘djschny’ it appears this is because you are not subscribed to anything yet.
I realize It does give a wierd error but I’m not sure what I can do about that
I still use it for my username ‘ravennger’ if you want to try it out first it’s still in working order for me, I just tested it.
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You’re right, I don’t have any subscriptions. I misinterpreted the post as being able to get subscriptions to any user, channel, playlist, etc. on youtube.
I was attempting to get a RSS feed for a personal playlist on youtube.
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Youtube already provides feeds for users or channels and actually for playlists as well.
I linked to the documentation for their normal feeds in the main article including users/channel feeds.
The following is the Syntax for their playlist feeds:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/playlists/PLAYLISTID
For example, I have a playlist called ‘commercials’ on my account. It’s ID is 7C8A0C24939B17D7. The URL for the given feed is:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/playlists/7C8A0C24939B17D7
The feed they provide is slightly less than desirable however as it doesn’t include playable videos. At some point I’ll fix this with a yahoo pipe and share that but for now at least you have the feed you were looking for.
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