Big Trapeze

I’ve spent the better part of the frustrating day trying to figure out the new YouTube APIs in relation to PHP. I have a project where I need to retrieve thumbnails from various YouTube videos, and I’ve been making it too hard (I’ve tried integrating the Zend Framework with PHP, Javascript, SimplePie RSS–which is a good tool, it turns out, and all sorts of DOM-reading PHP plugins).

It turns out, the easiest way to retrieve the standard thumbnail for a YouTube video is:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/2.jpg