Filtering YouTube #shorts

[woj-tek]

Unfortunately YouTube underwent tiktokizatinon and there are more and more short videos present. Most of them are quite... dumb as they serve as and hint that there is another full video or is an excerpt form full-length video...

There is no XML tag but there are tags (and there is #shorts in most/all of them) in the contents. Unfortunately miniflux only allow filtering by topic.

[Omrigan]

Unfortunately, for my channels of interest, there are no #shorts tags. But for you, maybe filtering rules would work?

[woj-tek]

As I said in my original message right at the end: "Unfortunately miniflux only allow filtering by topic." - those tags are included in the contents part so while filtering could work, it's no use it this case.

[jeromecst]

I think that an option to filter youtube videos by length should be added. IMO it is the best option, since Miniflux already fetches watch time using FETCH_YOUTUBE_WATCH_TIME

[agrmohit]

As a workaround I have created a python script that uses the Miniflux api to mark youtube videos of length 1 minute or less as read.
It works for shorts because videos shorter than 1 minute have a reading time of 1 minute in Miniflux.
The script requires FETCH_YOUTUBE_WATCH_TIME option to be set and can be set to run regularly using cron or systemd timers.

# Licensed under MIT license
# Link to discussion: https://github.com/orgs/miniflux/discussions/1827#discussioncomment-7480033

# Steps to use:
# - Install the Miniflux python client: https://miniflux.app/docs/api.html#python-client
# - Replace rss.example.com with your Miniflux instance url
# - Replace API_KEY with your Miniflux api key which you can get here https://rss.example.com/keys

import re
import miniflux

client = miniflux.Client("https://rss.example.com", api_key="API_KEY")

all_feeds = client.get_feeds()
youtube_feeds_ids = []

for feed in all_feeds:
    if re.match(r"https://www.youtube.com/channel/[\w-]*", feed["site_url"]):
        youtube_feeds_ids.append(feed["id"])

for feed_id in youtube_feeds_ids:
    entries = client.get_feed_entries(feed_id=feed_id)
    for entry in entries["entries"]:
        if entry["reading_time"] == 1 and entry["status"] == "unread":
            print(entry["id"], entry["title"])
            client.update_entries([entry["id"]], status="read")

[jeromecst]

thanks! I will definitely use it

[tagd]

Thanks! Encourage me to learn the API, so I could remedy another issue :)
Also made some changes to aggregate all entries then update to minimize API calls as I've got a lot of feeds.

def mark_shorts_read(feed_ids):
    entry_ids = []
    for feed_id in feed_ids:
        entries = client.get_feed_entries(feed_id=feed_id, status="unread")
        for entry in entries["entries"]:
            if entry["reading_time"] <= 1:
                entry_ids.append(entry["id"])
    if entry_ids: # If short found
        client.update_entries(entry_ids, status="read")

[BeeFox-sys]

ideally also an option to not include live streams until they have actually started i feel is in line with this discussion