Metafilter-Youtube Rolling Playlist

July 23, 2014 9:08 AM

Oh noes! The automatically generated youtube channel for metafilter videos doesn't seem to be working anymore...

In a previous
MetaTalk Post, I had asked about how to create a little webapp that would scrape all youtube links from metafilter posts and put them on one page, so that I could watch all that content in one sitting in front of my TV. It would be best to have it as a playlist or channel right in youtube...

For a while youtube was automatically generating a list like this, but it does not appear to be running anymore.

Thoughts? Does google have a service we can leverage?

posted by joecacti to Feature Requests at 9:08 AM (13 comments total)

Oh, huh, weird! Not sure what changed on YouTube's end, but then I wasn't really aware of that feature to begin with.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:09 AM on July 23, 2014

They aren't YouTube playlists, but check out Recent YouTube Links in Posts and Recent YouTube Links in Comments at Labs.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:16 AM on July 23, 2014 [5 favorites]

Once again, pb walks the walk in the talk. I can bring up that page on my M.O.J.O. Android set-top and clicky from there. Thanks pb!

Man, I can't WAIT to get home and make my 6 year old surf these with me :)
posted by joecacti at 9:41 AM on July 23, 2014

WHAT THE FUCK MATT GOOGLE

This is starting to feel like a Plot.
posted by zarq at 10:03 AM on July 23, 2014

WHAT THE FUCK

Yeah, not just "not working":

This channel was closed and is no longer available

Weird.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:21 AM on July 23, 2014

Yeah, because then you could have used youtube-dl and grabbed them all. Which I of course only learned about last week, and was juuust starting to experiment in adapting for use with those giant FPPs about specific shows, like this one.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:48 AM on July 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well that's lame. I'd just discovered the feed for videos from my own posts a month or so ago, and it was fun to revisit. Now I can't even find the page. (Speaking of which, doing a search for site:youtube.com rhaomi turns up a lot of apparent MeFi links that have some kind of YouTube redirect as the URL, though they lead to the original post. What's up with that?)

Anyway, boo Google (again). They seem to have a vendetta against RSS-friendly things lately.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:41 PM on July 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

I was subscribed to it and it seemed like Matt and pretty much the whole community was fine with it, but, really, it's a little weird for Google to be creating YouTube channels for websites completely independently of the web site's participation or permission. Maybe they decided that wasn't a good idea.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:39 PM on July 23, 2014

It still exists, here. Youtube rejiggered the 'topic' auto-generated channels a while back. I only know this because I had to track down the new one for GFi a while back (which I have just this moment discovered has been killed, for some reason. Sigh.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:26 PM on July 23, 2014

stavros, the header on that looks metafiltery, but the popular videos all look like software promos. I went to the videos page and only see two that actually look MeFi related.
posted by soelo at 5:38 PM on July 23, 2014

Huh. You're right. Youtube's doing something weird and new then, because the generated channels used to be just videos linked from the site in question. Now: utterly useless, apparently. One is compelled to ask: WTF?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:40 PM on July 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well, the page provided by pb is better anyway; it shows all the videos in a post, and the youtube one only ever showed the first video from any given post.
posted by ocherdraco at 5:11 AM on July 24, 2014

Playlists have been really odd.

Can't use them at all from phone or tablet.

Can use from laptop, but get stuck in a 2 or 3 video loop, repeating ad content.
posted by yesster at 11:22 PM on July 26, 2014