youcast

youcast is a simple command line tool which downloads m4a audio files from youtube channel and makes RSS feed to use them as a podcast feed

It uses yt-dlp for downloading/extracting audio files from youtube and creates RSS file. You can use any web-server app to deliver podcasts to your devices.

Getting Started

Usage:

youcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel id> <podcast name> <base url> [cover url]

Dependencies

• Linux/FreeBSD/MacOS
• Go compiler
• yt-dlp
• ffmpeg
• mutagen/AtomicParsley tool for embedding metadata
• web-server like nginx or apache

Installing

• use your operating system packaging tool to install go/yt-dlp/ffmpeg/nginx
• clone this repository
• run make binary or make release (to build for all supported systems)
• copy binary to appropriate place, like /opt/youcast/bin

Usage

First create directory for your podcasts storage, for example /var/www/podcasts Then create shell script to run youcast, for example /opt/bin/youcast.sh

#!/bin/sh

cd /var/www/podcasts
/opt/bin/youcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel id>/videos <channel keyword> <base url> <url to channel artwork>

Where:

<channel id> - youtube channel id (you could just click on "video" section of your favorite youtube channel and copy url)

<channel keyword> - a filename for rss feed

<base url> - a url pointing to podcasts directory, like http://www.site.tld/podcasts

<url to channel artwork> - you could copy a url to channel image from youtube channel page and paste it here

Don't forget chnmod 0755 /opt/bin/youcast.sh and run it for testing For more than one channel just add a call to youcast for each channel url

Run it and in podcasts directory (/var/www/podcasts) you should see a <channel_keyword>.rss file and a audio directory which holds m4a files.

Secondly make your web server config (example for nginx.conf)

server {
   server_name wwww.site.tld;
  
  # ....
  
  location /podcasts {
      alias /var/www/podcasts;
      autoindex on;
  }
  
  # ....
  
}

Then reload your webserver config (nginx -t && nginx -s reload) and open http://wwww.site.tld/podcasts in browser.

You should see a list of RSS files. Copy url of one of then and use it to add to your favorite podcast catcher application. I prefer Downcast and Overcast for iOS but RSS shoud be compatible to almost any podcast app.