No Shorts Please Hidden YouTube RSS Feed URLs

2 hours ago 1

Introduction

I consume quite a lot of content from YouTube, via their RSS feeds, and this was working fine until they added Shorts. I struggled to find a way to get the shorts out of my feed, eventually settling on scraping the YouTube API to query the video, and filtering out any that had a duration that was less than 61 seconds.

I accepted the odd false positive of a genuine regular video being less than a minute, it worked and it seemed like the least worst option.

Then around October 2024, I started to notice shorts reappearing in my mailboxes, and discovered that YouTube had increased the maximum length of a short to a whopping 3 minutes. The false positives for assuming all 3 minute or less videos were shorts was too much, so I went back to the drawing board to see if I could find a better workaround.. and surprisingly I found a much easier (but seemingly undocumented) way.

Playlist IDs

All Videos

This is the one you can find using “view source” on the “Videos” page of a channel.

No Shorts

If you replace channel_id with playlist_id and replace the leading UC prefix from UCabcdefgh with UULF you can get the RSS feed without shorts.

-https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCabcdefgh` +https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFabcdefgh`

Voilà! No more #shorts!

Credit

My source for this was a Stack Overflow post entitled YouTube channel and playlist ID prefixes by user Krateng.

That link has the following additional playlist IDs:

UU - all public uploads (videos + shorts + live streams) UULF - all public videos UUMO - all member videos (alternative UUMF) UULV - all live streams UUSH - all shorts UULP - popular videos UUPV - popular live streams UUPS - popular shorts UUMV - member live streams UUMS - member shorts