Podsync

Podsync solves an old, persistent problem in the modern audio ecosystem: a lot of useful audio lives on YouTube and never gets an RSS feed because the creators behind it never bothered to publish a separate podcast version. Long-form interview shows, lecture series, conference talks, video essays with strong audio tracks, archival material from channels that were big a decade ago, all of it sits there as video and requires an open browser to listen to.

The tool turns a YouTube channel or playlist into a normal podcast feed you can subscribe to in any podcast app, with options to strip video down to audio-only if you want the bandwidth and storage savings. The self-hosted route through Docker is the more reliable one if you're going to depend on it daily; the public hosted instance is fine for casual use but hits rate limits when YouTube tightens its API grip or when too many people are using the same shared infrastructure at once.

The fragility is inherent to the problem rather than the project's fault. YouTube periodically changes how its frontend works and tools like Podsync, Newpipe, and yt-dlp all have to chase the changes whenever they happen.

Feeds break, the maintainers patch them within days or weeks, and life continues. Worth the friction if you genuinely need video-channel-as-podcast for archiving, time-shifting interviews, or researching a body of work over time; not worth it if your goal is just to listen to a single show with a long backlog you could grab through other means.