checking if youtube thumbnail exists

Question

How to know if youtube thumbnail with max resolution exists without using Google API?

For instance, video with code doesn't have maxresolution. If we open URL: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/4rlR7EncGD0/maxresdefault.jpg we can see grey rectangle, that means no thumbnail, right?

The code I have, just checks if file exists. If file exists, it is showed within website. Unfourtunately this doesn't work for those "grey rectangles".

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

I'am using this:

        $item = '4rlR7EncGD0';
        $MaxResURL = 'https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/'.$item.'/maxresdefault.jpg';
        //print $MaxResURL;

        $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt_array($curl, array(    
        CURLOPT_URL => $MaxResURL,
        CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
        CURLOPT_NOBODY => true));

        $header = explode("\n", curl_exec($curl));
        curl_close($curl);

        //var_dump($header);        

        //If maxres image exists do something with it.
        if (strpos($header[0], '200') !== false) {    
            print $MaxResURL;
        }else{
            print 'Some Other IMG';
        }

This checks the headers using curl. And if it is good '200' prints the url, of course you can show the image or what you specifically need to do, I use this to add facebook and twitter metatags.

I used code from this answers:

How do I check if a string contains a specific word in PHP? To check for the 200 on the headers

And

PHP get_headers not working? To get the headers witch curl because I'm using wordpress and for some reason get_headers() was not working.

I'm not an expert and I do not know if this is the best aproach to resolve this issue but this code is working for me, hope it helps.

checking if youtube thumbnail exists

1 Answers1