Hi:
I just realized that featured images are not pulled out from some Youtube videos.
For example, I set this video url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRIuYUdkEA as featured video (post format is set to Video, of course) but the featured image is not extracted.
Then I changed the featured video url to ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrbM1l_BoI for testing another video and the featured image is shown when the post is published.
I checked on Youtube that the video has the embed code enabled. Even videos from Vevo work as featured image.
Note: video does appear on the published post no matter if the featured image is grabbed or not.
Question: Is there a way to find out from which videos featured images can be grabbed? or a way to have the featured image previewed before hitting Save or Update post?
The “featured” frame for a video is set by the video author when uploading or transcoding a video, or YouTube auto-selects a non blank frame. Meaning, somebody can choose to show a frame with a product image vs somebody’s smiling face doing an intro or vice versa. You don’t get to pick the ‘poster frame’ for a video to show on your site.
Selected the thumbnail – there is no way you can choose that from any plugin or theme.
You would need to have uploaded the video and set the desired thumbnail. “Usually” it will be whatever image is seen on the video, when static on the page on your site when you do the embed, sometimes not.
TIP: you can usually see what the poster frame for a video on YouTube is by looking at the images in the sidebar on YouTube, or the static channel images for the video owner/uploader. THAT static image will normally be what a “grab” function will choose on any WordPress site.
If there is an auto-magical way to grab a selected frame from a video, like “scrub 10 seconds and grab screen cap” … I’m not aware of it, but it may be possible (likely crash your hosting account too).
Hope that helps. We run into this often when we do news articles about topics and include a video. The solution *we* came up with is to do a screen grab FROM the video, and the put that image on the page as a featured image.
Example: for this post, about holiday music, we wanted to grab image from video, but the poster frame is awful, so I used a screen cap app (SNAGIT), and grabbed an image from the video to make a featured image – MEANING, watched video on computer, did screen cap of image, then saved in Photoshop, uploaded to post:
http://ga-ga.com/644/july-4th-music-surprising-secrets-of-patriotic-songs/
(NOTE: this website still “technically” is under construction…. )
🙂
Hi Christopher:
Thank you for your detailed and exemplified answer 🙂
Yes, at the beginning I thought it was due to a bug of the theme, but then, when I tried other videos from Youtube, I did realize that there was a problem with the videos itself.
Though the videos do have a screenshot on the Youtube site, somehow the images are not populated when selected as Featured Video, and that is not a major issue, as you say, just screen capture the image frame you prefer and upload it as featured image and done.
Regarding the “preview of the featured image of the video”, on another site I use the Featured Video Plus plugin, (http://wordpress.org/plugins/featured-video-plus/)
That plugin let you have a preview of the image when you just paste the url, without saving or updating the article, it would be nice to have the same functionality on the featured video included in the theme.
Edit: I tested the same video url on that plugin and it gave me the featured image right away.
BTW, Nice site.
Thanks!
hi,
thank you for your suggestion ,
we will take a look.
Thanks for you message.
Radu A.
