Owning My Watch Later List

I don’t actually use YouTube a whole lot, but I’ve absolutely stolen Marty McGuire’s idea for “owning your ‘Watch Later’ list.” Here’s the—somewhat simpler, I think—approach I came up with:

1. Follow YouTube channels via RSS
2. Use Micropub to post interesting video URLs to my site
3. Publish a list of the most recent URLs
4. Have youtube-dl check that list at regular intervals, and process new videos only

That’s it.

I could’ve stuck with a purely text-based list, a GitHub gist perhaps, but since the site already supports different post types and Micropub … I chose the path of least resistance.

Some Technicalities

On my (Android) phone, I use Indigenous to post Reads to my Micropub endpoint. I’m not sure it supports the probably more appropriate—but whatevs—Watch post type. It doesn’t actually matter, as I’ve instructed My WordPress install to interpret incoming “Reads” with a YouTube URL as videos that belong in the “Watch Later” list.

A bit of custom PHP then outputs a plain-text list of the ten latest such videos. (I may eventually also publish a proper, IndieWeb-style public archive and feed.)

On my media server, I use a cron job to first download that list, and then feed it to youtube-dl by means of the -a argument. I’m also using --download-archive to keep a list of already downloaded and processed videos.