How can I handle youtube's thumbnail in rails?

Question

If user types youtube url in body and save record, I'd like to show its thumbnail in view.

Is there any good techniques? or good gem for that?

sample typed in url:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

score 8 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:17

8

Are you parsing the video ID code from the URL? I.e. in your example it'd be qrO4YZeyl0I.

Once you have this you can do anything you want with it. There are four thumbnails generated for each video.

http://img.youtube.com/vi/qrO4YZeyl0I/0.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/qrO4YZeyl0I/1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/qrO4YZeyl0I/2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/qrO4YZeyl0I/3.jpg

To simply select the default thumbnail for the video use:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/qrO4YZeyl0I/default.jpg

See this answer for more detail - How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:17

Community

1
1

answered Dec 30 '12 at 02:51

John H

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Ahh, great, don't know there is simpler way to get the thumbnail :) – subosito Dec 30 '12 at 03:10

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '14 at 20:39

I needed youtube thumbnails recently, so just an update. Currently urls look like:

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/default.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/mqdefault.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/hqdefault.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/sddefault.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/1.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/2.jpg
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/video_id/3.jpg

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 30 '12 at 02:49

3

You can parse the url, and get the thumbnail from the youtube before saving the model:

Gemfile:

gem 'youtube_it'

Model:

before_save :get_youtube_thumbnail

def get_youtube_thumbnail
  url = extract_url_from_body

  unless url.blank?
    client   = YouTubeIt::Client.new
    response = client.video_by(url)
    self.thumbnail = response.thumbnails.first.url
  end
end

def extract_url_from_body
  URI.extract(body).first
end

View:

<%= image_tag model.thumbnail, alt: model.title %>

answered Dec 30 '12 at 02:49

subosito

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@MKK, you can combine `get_youtube_thumbnail` with @Jonny's answer. That's much faster since there is no request to youtube to get the thumbnail. – subosito Dec 30 '12 at 03:11
for Vimeo you can look up `gem 'vimeo'` – Serge Vinogradoff Mar 02 '14 at 14:04

How can I handle youtube's thumbnail in rails?

3 Answers3