How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API?

Question

If I have a YouTube video URL, is there any way to use PHP and cURL to get the associated thumbnail from the YouTube API?

Answer 1

If you want to get rid of the "black bars" and do it like YouTube does it, you can use:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/

And if you can't use the .webp file extension you can do it like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/

Also, if you need the unscaled version, use maxresdefault instead of mqdefault.

Note: I'm not sure about the aspect ratio if you're planning to use maxresdefault.