How to correctly use oembed to pull thumbs from youtube - youtube-api

Question

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?

Answer 1

I came across this page from youtube explaining their oembed support, They mentioned that they output to json format so I made a function that gets the json data and then enables you to use it.
Feel free to ask if you need more help.
<?php
$youtube_url = 'http://youtu.be/oHg5SJYRHA0'; // url to youtube video
function getJson($youtube_url){
$baseurl = 'http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url='; // youtube oembed base url
$url = $baseurl . $youtube_url . '&format=json'; // combines the url with format json
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($url)); // gets url and decodes the json
return $json;
}
$json = getJson($youtube_url);
// from this point on you have all your data placed in variables.
$provider_url = $json->{'provider_url'};
$thumbnail_url = $json->{'thumbnail_url'};
$title = $json->{'title'};
$html = $json->{'html'};
$author_name = $json->{'author_name'};
$height = $json->{'height'};
$thumbnail_width = $json->{'thumbnail_width'};
$thumbnail_height = $json->{'thumbnail_height'};
$width = $json->{'width'};
$version = $json->{'version'};
$author_url = $json->{'author_url'};
$provider_name = $json->{'provider_name'};
$type = $json->{'type'};
echo '<img src="'.$thumbnail_url.'" />'; // echo'ing out the thumbnail image

Answer 2

Ok I came up with a solution from pieces of other questions. First we need to get the id from any type of url youtube has using this function.
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;
}
Now we can get use YouTube Data API to get the thumbnail from the video id. Looks like this.
<?php
$vid_id = getVideoId($video_code);
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/$vid_id?v=2&alt=jsonc"));
echo '<img src="' . $json->data->thumbnail->sqDefault . '" width="176" height="126">';
?>
The problem is that is causing an extra 2 seconds load time so I simply use the $vid_id and place it inside http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/<?php echo $vid_id; ?>/default.jpg which gets rid of the 2 seconds added by accessing the youtube api.