I was looking into this a few days ago, but was having a hard time finding an RSS reader that was desktop software and handled Youtube feeds. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t tied to a SaaS or required hosting online.
Seconded. I've been using NetNewsWire for a couple of decades, and it does the unglamorous job of displaying feeds without ads, nags, or feature churn.
I believe yarr fills all your requirements. Can run as standalone on linux, and if you click "read here" the video gets embed. Assuming an extra click is not disqualifying. Note I have not verified this because I host it on a VPS.
What readers have you tried? What do you mean by "handled YouTube feeds". YouTube feeds just work as far as I am aware, they are fairly regular feeds. Are you expecting something in particular?
- doesn’t make me click a link and load the video in the browser, but plays in app
Akregator on KDE Plasma doesn’t support this, but you’d think “video/podcast” support would be a feature listed in the bullets of the feed reader software. A lot of the readers I looked at did not have it listed on a quick glance.
You can set this up today with newsboat, if you are fine with writing a small helper script that will parse browsing links for "youtube" string and open them directly in mpv. There are a bunch of examples of these sorts of scripts on peoples githubs where they already went through the trouble of writing regex for video and image file links (beyond just youtube) for you. You then add a line in the newsboat config file to set the default browser to your helper script.
I extended one to include opening rss subscribed reddit links in rtv in my terminal window, for example.