I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven’t used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

Ah, yeah. From this post:

• Go to the YouTube channel page.
• Click more for the About box.
• Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.
• Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id plus that channel ID from the previous step.

From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

Otherwise, I’ve been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to organize the “episodes.”

Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought, but it also does make a certain amount of sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment will Frosty the Snowman itself into being your friend, right…?