Create thumbnails for Youtube & Vimeo Videos using PHP

Here we are going to see how to generate thumbnail images from youtube and vimeo videos. This article will be useful when creating a video gallery.

Creating thumbnails of Youtube videos

Creating thumbnails for Youtube is an easy task to perform, actually PHP code is not necessary to perform this.

Each YouTube video has 4 generated images. They are predictably formatted as follows:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/1.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/2.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/3.jpg

Example:

Say link "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdoTdG_VNV4&feature=g-all",

In this youtube link video id is "QdoTdG_VNV4". So if you want to create thumbnail for this videos use this id with the above representation.

http://img.youtube.com/vi/QdoTdG_VNV/0.jpg

Creating thumbnails of Vimeo videos

For Vimeo thumbnails can be generated using simple PHP code. 

<?php

$imgid = <video-id>;

$hash = unserialize(file_get_contents("http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$imgid.php"));

echo $hash[0]['thumbnail_medium'];  

?>

If "http://vimeo.com/36519586" is the Vimeo link then <video-id> is "36519586".

Thank You!