I made a first-pass at this filter thing! Definitely a quick-and-dirty hack. My first time using PHP’s SimplePie feed parser and it felt very 🔥XML🔥 to do so. No promises on when or whether I will add features to it later.

https://git.schmarty.net/schmarty/youtube-rss-to-htmlmf2/src/branch/main/public/index.php

I set this up on the same virtual server that runs my Aperture service, made it only accessible from localhost with a listen 127.0.0.2:80 and gave it a name by adding a 127.0.0.2 youtubefilter line to /etc/hosts.

Now I can update my feeds from something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCco4TTt7ikz9xnB35HrD5gQ

To something like this:

http://youtubefilter/?channel_id=UCco4TTt7ikz9xnB35HrD5gQ

Doing these by hand in Aperture is actually a bit painful. For each feed I need to:

1. Choose a feed and click Settings to copy the feed URL, then close that dialog.
2. Click the “New Source” button and paste in the URL.
3. Edit the URL to replace https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml with http://youtubefilter/
4. Click ‘Preview’ and confirm that the feed is identified as microformats and then save.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the channel to find the new entry and click Settings to give it a meaningful name that isn’t “youtubefilter”

So I’ll probably script a few things to make this easier. Including a Microsub client script that will do this for a whole channel, and shortcuts/bookmarklets that make it easier to go from a YouTube channel page to the youtubefilter URL ready to add to Aperture.