While most podcasts are available on multiple platforms and either offer an RSS feed or have one that can be discovered, some are only available in the form of a YouTube channel. Thankfully, it's possible to both monitor them for new episodes (i.e. new videos), and time-shift the audio for later offline listening.

Subscribing to a channel via RSS is possible thanks to the built-in, but not easily discoverable, RSS feeds. See these instructions for how to do it. As an example, the RSS feed for the official Government of BC channel is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC6n9tFQOVepHP3TIeYXnhSA.

When it comes to downloading the audio, the most reliable tool I have found is yt-dlp. Since the exact arguments needed to download just the audio as an MP3 are a bit of a mouthful, I wrote a wrapper script which also does a few extra things:

• cleans up the filename so that it can be stored on any filesystem
• adds ID3 tags so that MP3 players can have the metadata they need to display and group related podcast episodes together

If you find that script handy, you may also want to check out the script I have in the same GitHub repo to turn arbitrary video files into a podcast.