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?