Getting Started

YouTube Images can be used to extract thumbnails/images for a given youtube video ID or URL without a developer ID. It uses a URL constructor instead of an API

Requirement

Ruby 1.9 or greater

Installation

YouTube Images is released as a Ruby Gem. The gem is to be installed within a Ruby or Rails application. To install, simply add the following to your Gemfile:

# Gemfile
gem 'youtube_images'

After updating your bundle, you can use YouTubeImages::For("video-id") function within your ruby code

Usage

For example if you want to fetch the default thumbnail for youtube URL you can do something like this

YouTubeImages::For("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs")[:default]
# or
YouTubeImages::For("5zVaFjSxAZs")[:default]

Advanced Usage

YouTubeImages::For("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs")

will return a hash for default, medium, high and maximum dimension images

So to access different dimension images you can do something like this

YouTubeImages::For("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs")[:medium]

YouTubeImages::For("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs")[:high]

YouTubeImages::For("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs")[:maximum]