Thumbnails from the Vimeo website harder than YouTube

Question

Our website lets people add videos by submitting a URL - usually one from YouTube or Vimeo. I'd like to show thumbnails, when giving people a list of videos.

YouTube make this easy for me - just slap "1.jpg" on the end of the URL, and you've got your image.

Vimeo seem to want me to make a HTTP request, and extract the thumbnail URL from the XML they return - what? Who's got time for that?!!! Plus, I'd have to store these URLs too, I can't get them on the fly for a page that lists 20 videos.

Is there an easier way to get Vimeo thumbnails? I can't find one...

Answer 1

In case you're interested, here's some ASP to get the YouTube thumbnail:

'get the video URL from my database, call it sThumbURL
'it is of the form http://www.youtube.com/v/1234567890A
sThumbURL = Replace(sThumbURL, "www.youtube.com/v/", "img.youtube.com/vi/")
sThumbURL = sThumbURL & "/1.jpg"

Answer 2

See this answer!