Make a feed, choose its channels, and catch up in one place. New to grouping channels by topic? Read how to organize YouTube subscriptions.

Create your first feed

  1. Open YouTube. Retube adds a highlighted Set up Retube entry to the left sidebar and opens a short callout next to it. The toolbar icon’s Create your first feed button leads to the same place.
  2. Name your feed. A name is all you need; you can change it and its color later.
  3. Pick channels from your YouTube subscriptions, or paste a YouTube @handle, channel URL, or channel ID.
  4. Add more channels or make another feed from Manage channels. A channel can belong to several feeds.

The callout can be dismissed with Later. Until a first feed exists, the sidebar entry stays highlighted and hovering it shows the callout again. Once you have created a feed, these hints stay away for good, even if you later delete every feed.

What’s new

After a meaningful update, a release drawer opens once YouTube has loaded and you have a quiet moment. It waits while a video is playing or you are typing. Close it with Escape, the close button, or the blurred backdrop. Routine fixes and fresh installs do not show this announcement.

What’s new appears in Retube’s YouTube sidebar and compact menu only until the release has been shown. You can reopen it from feed options or the extension popup anytime. Full changelog opens the complete release history and closes the drawer. If the drawer is unavailable, the popup opens the release history. After an extension update, an already-open YouTube tab may need a reload before the new drawer is available.

Organize your channels

Manage channels opens a full page within Retube. From the sidebar, it shows channels across All feeds. Each channel lists its feed assignments; choose Edit feeds to change them. When adding channels here, choose their destination with Add to feed. Use Pick from subscriptions to select several at once, search your subscriptions, or Select shown after filtering the list. Channels already in the destination feed are hidden. Adding a selection preserves existing assignments. You can also paste a channel link.

The channel list is alphabetical. Search your channels matches names and handles without changing their feed assignments.

Use the feed selector in the page heading to choose a particular feed or All feeds. The channels button in a feed’s header, which shows how many channels it has, opens this view directly. Adding or removing channels affects the named feed. When you open management from a feed, the back arrow returns to that feed and its scroll position, even if you change the management filter. Removing a channel’s last assignment also removes it from your local library.

Add from a channel page

Every YouTube channel page shows a Retube group beside Subscribe. It lists the feeds the channel is in as colored chips; hover over them or move keyboard focus into them to show their names. Select a chip to open that feed, or its × to remove the channel from it. Undo puts it back.

Add opens the channel’s feeds. Select a feed to add the channel to it, or choose New feed to create a feed that already contains the channel. When the channel isn’t in any feed yet, the group reads Add to feed, or New feed before you have made any feeds.

Open your feeds

The popup opens feeds inside YouTube and matches the active YouTube tab’s theme, or another YouTube tab in the same window. If no YouTube tab is available, it follows your system theme. The Retube shortcut appears in YouTube’s sidebar, including in tabs that were already open when Retube was installed.

Tabs and older videos

Each feed’s header has All, Videos, Shorts, and Live tabs. The refresh button checks for new videos, and the channels button opens channel management. Switch feeds from the Retube section in YouTube’s sidebar.

The three-dot Feed options menu edits or deletes the current feed and creates a new one.

Older uploads load as you scroll, and Load more videos fetches them directly. Retry after a temporary network error.

Opening videos

Inside YouTube, cards use YouTube’s own menus, thumbnail behavior, and resume-progress bars when available for your session. Use their three-dot menu for actions such as Watch later, playlists, and queue. The progress bar shows where playback left off, not total time watched. Refresh the feed after watching elsewhere to update it.

A card falls back to a basic view if YouTube’s renderer is unavailable. Retube does not keep its own opened or watched history.

Help without leaving your feed

Open Feed options and find About, Help, Privacy, and What’s new at the bottom of the menu. You can also open these pages directly from the extension popup, even before creating a feed. These pages open in the content area inside YouTube. YouTube’s sidebar and theme stay in place. Choose All videos or one of your feeds in the sidebar to return. Browser Back and Forward also work between these pages.

Backup, restore, and delete

Open Help & support → Backup & local data. Export before reinstalling or moving to another browser profile. Import accepts Retube JSON backups up to 5 MB, shows a preview, and asks before replacing your data. Clear local data asks before deleting your settings and cached uploads. Uninstalling removes extension-local data; exported files must be deleted separately.

Troubleshooting

  • Library won’t open: if the extension does not respond, Retube shows a Retry button after ten seconds. Try again, or reload the YouTube tab after an extension update.
  • No sidebar shortcut: confirm Retube is enabled and allowed to access www.youtube.com in your browser’s extension settings, or choose Allow access in the toolbar popup. After an extension update, reload the YouTube tab.
  • Subscriptions are not listed: sign in to YouTube in that tab, then choose Try again, or paste a channel link instead. Retube reads the list from the open tab and keeps only the channels you pick.
  • Channel cannot be found: copy the channel’s @handle or channel-page URL, rather than a video link.
  • Feed is empty: check assigned channels and choose the All tab.
  • Older uploads stop: use Load more or Retry. Refresh the feed and try again after a short wait if YouTube is rate limiting requests.
  • Native menus or progress are missing: check that you are signed in to YouTube, then refresh the feed. Not every video has a progress bar or every action. Reload the YouTube tab after switching accounts.
  • YouTube’s layout changed: reload the tab and check for a Retube update. Changes to YouTube’s layout or data format can interrupt custom feeds.
  • Missing uploads: feeds use your YouTube session, but availability still depends on what YouTube returns for each channel tab. Shorts with no date appear after dated videos; older relative timestamps are approximate.

Contact the developer

Email info@uptek.com, or use the developer contact or Support section on the Chrome Web Store listing. Include the Retube version, your browser and its version, a public channel URL and steps to reproduce the problem. A screenshot can help; remove personal information first. Never send passwords or account tokens.

Retube is made by Uptek and is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.