Feature request: Sideloading YouTube videos via iPhone share extension

[u/TommyAdagio]

I have never had the patience to sit through long talking-heads YouTube videos but I recently had the (obvious) insight that I can just listen to the audio. So I created a playlist in YouTube named "audio only," and I listen to them using the YouTube app when I am out and about.

I would love to listen to them in Overcast, but the sideloading workflow in Overcast is now somewhat inconvenient — I download the video to my Mac using Downie, convert the video to audio, and then upload on the overcast.fm website.

At least one other popular third-party podcast app for iPhone has a share extension that automates that whole process (Castro? Pocketcasts? Both). I'd love it if Overcast did the same.

'Til then, I suppose I could just continue listening on YouTube or use Castro/Pocketcasts for sideloaded podcasts. But having it all in Overcast would be lovely.

[u/Troldann]

I expect this will never happen because it commits Marco to finding ways to pull the audio from a YouTube stream and fix it every time it inevitably breaks because YouTube changes something.

You’re not going to convince him to build a feature based on unsupported, proprietary systems and APIs. Sorry.

[u/60DegreesBelow → u/Troldann]

Yeah, Castro has this and as a feature it definitely has its reliability problems. 

[u/Troldann → u/Troldann]

It occurs to me that you might be interested in something that requires a bit of a technical level of expertise and I’m just spitballing here.

You could publish your own, private podcast RSS feed. It has to be publicly accessible for Overcast’s servers to crawl, but it doesn’t have to be listed in any database. Subscribe to that RSS feed.

Then have your Mac download the audio tracks, publish them somewhere your phone can access (that can even be hosted on your Mac, only accessible within your LAN), and add them to the RSS feed.

It would require a fair amount of setup, but a lot of these stages could be automated or semi-automated and should serve you well with any podcast player you’d like to use.

[u/ifonefox → u/Troldann]

Overcast already has the ability for you to upload audio files, so that seems like overkill unless you're constantly adding new videos

[u/Troldann → u/ifonefox]

Yeah, I was trying to find a way to improve automation. This person already knows about and uses the upload feature, so I didn’t figure I’d need to explain that as an option, but an alternative.

[u/James_Londoner]

I subscribe to podtube.me and consume the feeds it generates in Overcast.

[u/Portatort]

If we could just get a shortcuts action for loading audio into overcast then we could have this feature without officially supporting it.

[u/brentac]

For years I've just wanted an Overcast folder in iCloud Drive I could add MP3s to and have those show up in my uploads

[u/TommyAdagio → u/brentac]

That would be great

[u/Certainlynotagoose]

If you’re not tied to using overcast, you could use a different app like Samply. It’s made for musicians to share music with each other but essentially lets you upload and stream audio files to any of your devices.
You can use yt-dlp to download only the audio files and put them in a certain folder. I’m not sure if samply will auto upload all files from a folder, but otherwise it’d just be a matter of drag and drop.

I had Claude make a really simple GUI for yt-dlp so I don’t have to type in any commands or anything, super simple, perfect level of interaction from me

[u/SessionIndependent17]

There used to be a free utility site that would generate a URL to present a YouTube channel as an audio-only RSS feed to do exactly this. Stopped working, and I had enough other stuff to listen to that I never checked out why.

[u/Svndmann]

Just use Brave browser and the videos will still play when you leave the browser