Display YouTube videos from a users RSS Feed with PHP

Using an RSS feed you can load videos from a users feed, this can be as simple as a list of videos to embed them.

The demo loads the 10 latest videos from my YouTube channel.

To get started first create a function to use curl which will load the rss feed to pass to it.

function curl_get_contents($url) {
    // Initiate the curl session
    $ch = curl_init();
    // Set the URL
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    // Removes the headers from the output
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    // Return the output instead of displaying it directly
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    //set timeout
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 1);
    // Execute the curl session
    $output = curl_exec($ch);
    // Close the curl session
    curl_close($ch);
    // Return the output as a variable
    return $output;
}

Now call the function and passing the address to an RSS feed, change the channel_id to the id of the channel you want to use. To find the id of a channel:

Go to the YouTube channel you want to track
View the page’s source code
Look for the following text: channel-external-id
Get the value for that element (it’ll look something like UCBcRF18a7Qf58cCRy5xuWwQ
Credit for the above steps from https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel

If you don't have curl installed you can use file_get_contents instead.

After adding the feed path to a variable convert it to xml by using SimpleXmlElement

$feed = curl_get_contents("https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC7QziMG7v407vgQLUzyFG_A");
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($feed);

At this point you might want to see what the $xml variable contains using print_r is a good way of displaying its contents:

 print_r($xml);

Now the $xml is an object pulling information out is a simple process for instance to display the title of the video you need to go down to that part of the object this is done using -> notations each one moves to the next section $xml->entry moves into the entry section from there you can grab the title:

 echo $xml->entry->title;

This only gets the very first item to get more than one you'll need to loop through all the entries, you can use a foreach here but you have better control using a for loop then you can either loop for all of the entries or limit them to say the first 10, this approach makes more sense they may be a lot of entries to it makes sense to limit them.

If you did want to load all entries you can count them by using:

$count = count($xml->entry);

In this instance, I'm only loading 10 entries to reduce loading times, inside a for loop which says while $i is less than 10 increments $i so once it reaches 20 it will stop incrementing $i and stop.

 for ($i=0; $i < 10; $i++) {

Inside the loop the first thing I'm doing is looking at the url of the video and I only want the video id part for
example look at the following url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeX7MOWKi0s&feature=youtube_gdata notice EeX7MOWKi0s that's the part I want to use, it's worth noting this step is only needed if you want to embed the video.

First I collect the url as its an array I've appended () to the end next I'm exploding where the url have an & only looking at the href array element. Then removing the address as that part does not change.

$url = $xml->entry[$i]->link->attributes();
$videourl = explode("&",$url['href']);
$video = str_replace("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=","",$videourl[0]);

To embed the video its jut a case of using an iframe and passing in the video id:

echo '<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/'.$video.'" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>';

As we are in a loop to display the correct item we need to tell the array, in this case, the entry which part we want to use I do this by passing in $i after the entry so to get all the titles in a loop:

echo $xml->entry[$i]->title;

All of the items are called the same way so I won't go over all of them, I've only chosen a few in my example you could have the author the category etc.

Another one worth noting is the published date I don't like how it looks in the feed to I've customised it by using date and strtotime.

date('jS M Y h:i:s', strtotime($xml->entry[$i]->published))

This has a much nice look to it, plus you can easily change how the date and time will be displayed.

Putting it all together:

<?php

function curl_get_contents($url) {
    // Initiate the curl session
    $ch = curl_init();
    // Set the URL
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    // Removes the headers from the output
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    // Return the output instead of displaying it directly
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    //set timeout
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 1);
    // Execute the curl session
    $output = curl_exec($ch);
    // Close the curl session
    curl_close($ch);
    // Return the output as a variable
    return $output;
}

$feed = curl_get_contents("https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC7QziMG7v407vgQLUzyFG_A");
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($feed);

$count = count($xml->entry);
for ($i=0; $i < 10; $i++) { 
    $url = $xml->entry[$i]->link->attributes();
    $videourl = explode("&",$url['href']);
    $video = str_replace("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=","",$videourl[0]);
    
    echo '<h1>'.$xml->entry[$i]->title.'</h1>';
    echo '<p>Posted on '.date('jS M Y h:i:s', strtotime($xml->entry[$i]->published)).'</p>';
    echo '<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/'.$video.'" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>';
    echo '<p>'.$xml->entry[$i]->content.'</p>';
    echo '<p><a href="'.$url['href'].'">Play on Youtube</a></p>';
}
?>

Display YouTube videos from a users RSS Feed with PHP

Table of Contents

Putting it all together: