I've been consuming my YouTube videos via RSS and youtube-dl these days. I have a little python script that collects the video urls from the feed, downloads them, and then NewsBlur notifies me of the new videos. NewsBlur has become the way I find new academic papers (arXiv/journal RSS feeds), consume the news, webcomics, and YouTube videos.
I didn't know arxiv had an rss feed, I usually find interesting papers through reddit, twitter and paperscape. Do you do any filtering on the feed to find the good stuff?
Luckily arXiv RSS feeds are by category, so I scan the titles of all e.g. qbio papers for a day and add the interesting ones to my reading list.