Get the Youtube Video Thumbnail from Youtube video Url using PHP

Question

Lets say I have a youtube video url www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2

I want to get the video thumbnail ->

Answer 1

To extract the identifier from the following URL :

$url = 'www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2';

You can first use parse_url() to get the query string :

$queryString = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY);
var_dump($queryString);

Which, here, would give you :

string 'v=B4CRkpBGQzU&feature=youtube_gdata&par1=1&par2=2' (length=49)

And, then, use parse_str() to extract the parameters from that query string :

parse_str($queryString, $params);
var_dump($params);

Which would get you the following array :

array
  'v' => string 'B4CRkpBGQzU' (length=11)
  'feature' => string 'youtube_gdata' (length=13)
  'par1' => string '1' (length=1)
  'par2' => string '2' (length=1)

And, now, it's just a matter of using the v item from that array, injecting it into the thumbnail URL :

if (isset($params['v'])) {
    echo "i3.ytimg.com/vi/{$params['v']}/default.jpg";
}

Which gives :

i3.ytimg.com/vi/B4CRkpBGQzU/default.jpg