Question

I’m using the code I found below to get the thumbnail url of a youtube video from a submitted url. The only problem is it doesn’t work if someone uses the shortened version of the video url like http://youtube.be/HMYMSvlow_k. How can I modify this code so that it processes the youtube.be version as well as the other longer links?

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;

}

Answer 1

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;
}

$vid_id = getVideoId($video_code);
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/<?php echo $vid_id; ?>/default.jpg