Recently I’ve been asked how easy it will be to get the initial screenshot of a youtube video attached in an email template with as less pain as possible.
A bit of googling told me that you can get all public information of a video using the following endpoing
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/videoid?v=2
By using one of my favourite songs…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OguPPZ_7u60
The request becomes…
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OguPPZ_7u60?v=2
Just to test a bit whats going on I’ve tested the url with
curl -I https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OguPPZ_7u60?v=2
Lets check the contents of the url
curl https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OguPPZ_7u60?v=2
It’s an xml file with a lof of information…lets save it in a file
curl https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OguPPZ_7u60?v=2 > my_favourite_music_video_data.xml
Opening the file with vim the xml is all within a single line…I cannot read it like this, I need to
:%s/></>\r</g
and voi la!!!….
I have the url that gives me a reasonable quality thumbnail of a video..
https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/OguPPZ_7u60/hqdefault.jpg
all that I need now is an easy way for the user to give the video code and just replace it in an img tag source that will point to the url above!! :)
Cheers