Working around the YouTube Channel RSS limit

I’ve been falling behind watching Masahiro Sakurai’s game development videos, so decided to subscribe to his YouTube channel using RSS. This is as simple as plugging the channel URL https://youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en into your RSS feed reader.

BUT only the most recent 15 videos will be listed!

Google’s YouTube API allows listing of the most recent 50 videos, but that’s easier said than done as you’d have to get an API key, write some code to do this query, and host it somewhere online. Wouldn’t it be great if somebody else has already done the hard work and is sharing their solution?

Well, we’re in luck!

Thanks to this helpful StackOverflow comment, you can use the following URL to list the most recent 50 videos from Sakurai’s channel:

https://scriptbarrel.com/xml.cgi?channel_id=UCv1DvRY5PyHHt3KN9ghunuw&name=%40sora_sakurai_en

This will work for any other YouTube channel by simply substituting the relevant channel_id and name details.

If you need more than 50

You can use Authory (free 30 day trial) to create a feed that will return up to 1000 most recent videos.

Important: getting back on track

After you’ve retrieved the historic videos, you should edit the RSS feed link in your reader to change it back to the original YouTube channel link. This will let you keep the historic videos from the workaround feed and retrieve any future videos from the standard YouTube feed, so you’re not relying on a third-party service.