How I turned an RSS feed into YouTube Shorts without filming anything
I run a small content site and the advice everyone gives is the same. Post short-form video, it's where the reach is, YouTube Shorts, Reels, TikTok, all of it. The problem is I write. I don't film, I don't edit, and I definitely don't want to be on camera. My content already exists though, sitting in an RSS feed, updating every day.
So the question became: how do I turn that feed into vertical videos without learning a video editor or paying an editor per clip?
Here's what I figured out, and the pipeline I ended up with.
Why RSS is actually a great Shorts source
An RSS feed is already curated. Someone, usually you, decided those articles were worth publishing. Headlines are already written to get attention, which is basically what a Shorts hook is. And the feed updates itself, so there's always fresh material to pull from without sitting down to brainstorm.
The tricky part is everything after the feed. You need a script that works in 30 to 60 seconds, a voice reading it, subtitles, a background, and an MP4 in 9:16. Doing that by hand per video is a solid hour of work minimum, which kills the whole point.
The pipeline that actually works
What I landed on is a desktop tool called AI Shorts Creator. It does the whole chain in one run. You can paste text, upload a file, or point it at an RSS feed, and it handles the rest.
The flow looks like this. It pulls an article from the feed, OpenAI rewrites it into a short video script with a hook, scenes, a title and hashtags. There's a tone setting too, so you can go engaging, dramatic, educational or funny depending on the content. ElevenLabs generates the voiceover, which honestly sounds good enough that I stopped questioning it. Then FFmpeg assembles everything into a 1080x1920 MP4 with burned-in subtitles, a title overlay and whatever background video or image you give it. Background music gets mixed in and automatically ducked down so it doesn't fight the voice.
The output is a finished file. Not a rough draft you still have to edit, an actual ready-to-upload Short.
What it costs to run
The app itself is a one-time purchase. The running costs are just the APIs. OpenAI is around a cent per video. ElevenLabs is the bigger piece, their Starter plan is about six dollars a month and that covers roughly two thousand videos, which is way more than I produce. Total is around twelve cents a video. Compared to paying an editor or burning an hour per clip, that's nothing.
Setup is simpler than it sounds. It's a dashboard you launch with a start.bat file, no coding needed. You put your API keys in a .env file once, pick a voice from the list it pulls from your ElevenLabs account, add a background, and it's ready. Everything assembles locally, the only internet it needs is the API calls.
Where it's actually useful
Faceless channel owners will get the most out of it, that's the obvious use case. News and tech bloggers too, since they're already sitting on RSS feeds full of content. Affiliate marketers pushing product content. Anyone who wants to scale short-form output without filming or editing.
The honest limitations
You still need to review what it makes. The scripts are good but occasionally the tone or the article pick is off, and uploading garbage at scale hurts more than uploading nothing. It also leans on two paid APIs, so it's not a zero-cost tool even though the per-video cost is tiny. And it's a Windows desktop app, not a cloud thing, so it runs on your machine.
If you want to check it out:
AI Shorts Creator — Automatic Vertical Video Generator
Full source code included, dashboard, setup guide, lifetime updates. There's a README in the download that walks through the API setup step by step.
Happy to answer questions in the comments, especially if you've tried other text-to-video pipelines and found weak points worth knowing about.
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