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youtube-apithumbnailsoembed

How to correctly use oembed to pull thumbs from youtube


I show a lot of thumbs on my homepage from youtube videos. I was using this function below to grab the thumb from a youtube url which works fast but it doesn't work for url's in the shortned form like youtu.be/JSHDLSKL.

function get_youtube_screen_link( $url = '', $type = 'default', $echo = true ) {
if( empty( $url ) )
    return false;

if( !isset( $type ) )
    $type = '';

$url = esc_url( $url );

preg_match("|[\\?&]v=([^&#]*)|",$url,$vid_id);

if( !isset( $vid_id[1] ) )
    return false;

$img_server_num =  'i'. rand(1,4);

switch( $type ) {
    case 'large':
        $img_link = "http://{$img_server_num}.ytimg.com/vi/{$vid_id[1]}/0.jpg";
        break;
    case 'first':
        // Thumbnail of the first frame
        $img_link = "http://{$img_server_num}.ytimg.com/vi/{$vid_id[1]}/1.jpg";
        break;
    case 'small':
        // Thumbnail of a later frame(i'm not sure how they determine this)
        $img_link = "http://{$img_server_num}.ytimg.com/vi/{$vid_id[1]}/2.jpg";
        break;
    case 'default':
    case '':
    default:
        $img_link = "http://{$img_server_num}.ytimg.com/vi/{$vid_id[1]}/default.jpg";
        break;
}
if( $echo )
    echo $img_link;
else
    return $img_link;

}

So I tried to use Oembed to get the thumbs instead which works for all variations of the youtube url but it retrieves the 480px/360px thumb which causes a lot of cropping to get it down to the 120px/90px size I use to display them. The other issue was it caused my page speed to increase by 4 seconds which Im guessing is a problem with the way I'm implementing it. Here's how I call the thumb inside a loop.

<?php 
 require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-includes/class-oembed.php');
 $oembed= new WP_oEmbed;
 $name = get_post_meta($post->ID,'video_code',true);
 $url = $name;
//As noted in the comments below, you can auto-detect the video provider with the following
 $provider = $oembed->discover($name);
//$provider = 'http://www.youtube.com/oembed';
 $video = $oembed->fetch($provider, $url, array('width' => 300, 'height' => 175));
 $thumb = $video->thumbnail_url; if ($thumb) { ?>
   <img src="<?php echo $thumb; ?>" width="120px" height="90px" />
<?php } ?>

So how should I be doing this to maximize efficiency?


Solution

  • Ok I came up with a solution from pieces of other questions. First we need to get the id from any type of url youtube has using this function.

    function getVideoId($url)
    {
    $parsedUrl = parse_url($url);
    if ($parsedUrl === false)
        return false;
    
    if (!empty($parsedUrl['query']))
    {
        $query = array();
        parse_str($parsedUrl['query'], $query);
        if (!empty($query['v']))
            return $query['v'];
    }
    
    if (strtolower($parsedUrl['host']) == 'youtu.be')
        return trim($parsedUrl['path'], '/');
    
    return false;
    }
    

    Now we can get use YouTube Data API to get the thumbnail from the video id. Looks like this.

    <?php
      $vid_id = getVideoId($video_code);
      $json = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/$vid_id?v=2&alt=jsonc"));
      echo '<img src="' . $json->data->thumbnail->sqDefault . '" width="176" height="126">'; 
    ?>
    

    The problem is that is causing an extra 2 seconds load time so I simply use the $vid_id and place it inside http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/<?php echo $vid_id; ?>/default.jpg which gets rid of the 2 seconds added by accessing the youtube api.