Long videos you were only listening to anyway
Interviews, lectures, commentary, the three hour show you have on while you cook. None of it needs a screen, and none of it belongs in a browser tab you have to keep alive. Once it is an episode in your podcast app you get the queue, the speed control, the offline download, the sleep timer and the place you left off, on every device, the way the rest of your listening already works.
You decide per import whether it stays video or becomes audio only. Players that handle video podcasts will show it. Audio only throws the picture away and leaves a much smaller file.
Channels, playlists and single videos
One URL can mean one video, a playlist somebody curated, or a whole channel. Give Feedcast a channel or a playlist and auto-sync keeps checking it, so new uploads land in your feed without you going back for them. And because a feed is just a collection, a YouTube source can sit in the same feed as an RSS show and a file off your desktop. The feed ends up organised around a subject or a habit rather than around the website each item came from.
Direct download only: YouTube import needs a tool the Mac App Store does not allow apps to bundle, so it is missing from the App Store build. Podcasts, RSS and your own files work the same in both.
Served from your Mac
The downloaded video or audio stays on your Mac, and the small server inside Feedcast hands it to whichever device asks. Online hosting publishes only the listing, the list of what exists, so players that need a web address can find it. Your phone fetches new episodes while it is on the same network as your Mac, or from anywhere through Tailscale.
This is a personal listening setup, not a way to republish anything. What you download is for you, and the source platform’s terms still apply.
Better than the original upload
A YouTube episode goes through the same pipeline as everything else. With Premium, Feedcast asks the SponsorBlock database for the video’s segments, which are exact to the second, so the sponsor read comes out cleanly. New videos often have no segments yet, so Feedcast checks again for a while after the upload, and it can hold a synced video out of your feed for a few hours to give SponsorBlock that time. Chapters the video already carries are kept, an episode without any can have them written from the transcript, and every word is transcribed on your Mac.
For everything that is not YouTube, see how to build a private podcast feed from RSS shows and your own files. For the processing itself, read about the podcast ad blocker and the transcript and chapter tools.