Youtube video timestamps are incorrect

Tiny Tiny RSS Support
1

I have used the following URL for my feeds: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

For some reason, ttrss parses the feed’s timestamps incorrectly and seemingly randomly. For example, the latest video might be 7th in the list when sorting by recent first. In some cases, a video from last year comes up at the top of my feed with a timestamp as if it was just uploaded (eg. “20 mins ago”). When I debug the feed, it parses the videos in the correct order.

Re-subscribing does not fix the issue.
I have tried this on the demo site (Tiny Tiny RSS : Login). The issue persists. Does that mean it’s a bug, or is there a fix?

2

I’d assumed this was just YouTube updating the RSS feed due to ‘reasons’ (might even just be comments on the video) such that older videos start showing as newer again (NB: same GUID, I mean the pubDate).

I’ve not actually gone and looked to be sure if pubDate is what’s changing though.

3

I looked through the XML file. There’s line below the date the video was published that says “updated” with the correct date that corresponds to the timestamp in the rss feed. What I’m fairly certain is happening is the owner of the video made adjustments, eg. editing a clip or maybe the description of the video.

This could be easily resolved by having a toggle in the settings to look for the published date and ignore updates.

4

adding a knob to feed editor for every broken feed out there, multiplied by every esoteric use-case. no.

e: then again you can always make a plugin.

5

Just in case anyone’s thinking of writing a plugin to try and do fixups in this scenario…

One scenario is that the initial publication is for a livestream, and then it gets updated when it actually goes live. I believe that’s what happened anyway, and both the published and updated timestamps were changed from their original values. Interestingly in this case the ‘original’ timestamps weren’t both the same, but they were after the update.

I don’t yet have an example for such a change not relating to a livestream. Time to target my script at a different channel…

6

I’m fairly certain that isn’t a thing on YT. (Tricks like YouTube video has its own URL in it | Hacker News excepted.)

7

How is youtube esoteric?

I only know basic HTML and CSS. I don’t even know what language to code a plugin with.

8

you are allowed to learn new things.

9

I use af_youtube_fix by evlampiev, but can’t seem to find it online anymore. It’s not perfect but tbh I’m surprised that youtube RSS feeds still exist at all.

GitHub - sal0max/ttrss-af_youtube_remove_updated: A tt-rss plugin. Removes the 'updated' element of Youtube feeds. Bringing some order. seems to be doing the same thing.

1 Like
10

Ah, thanks for that tomr - I just confirmed that it is indeed the updated timestamp changing that causes the “hey, that’s an older video, why does it look newer now?” phenomenon. I’ll try out that plugin.

11

Once again, I might be inclined to learn how to make a plugin if I knew what language I was supposed to learn.

12

Thanks for that plugin. It should be very useful. This plugin should be added to the list by default.

Honestly I prefer having a central place to view all my content. I don’t want to have to switch to youtube (in my case, a self-hosted invidious server) to view my content. I like having folders to sort my content, so I can have my tech and research channels in one folder, and entertainment stuff in another. If I was getting my content from youtube/invidious, I’d have to create multiple accounts to achieve the same thing, subscribe to those channels, manage and view the content from them separately. Also, I like being able to read the titles of the videos before viewing the thumbnails. It’s more streamlined and easier to consume the content.

If you know of any alternative I’d like to hear it.

13

This could be easily resolved by having a toggle in the settings to look for the published date and ignore updates.. .

14

i’m not going to add a checkbox for every kind of broken feed. this approach doesn’t scale.