Force High Quality Thumbnails for YouTube

Question

Is there a way to force a high quality THUMBNAIL for YouTube?

My videos are of very high quality and once they start streaming they run fine in 720p, however the thumbnail for the video is of variable quality - sometimes it's high, other times it's really blurry.

Is there a way of forcing a high quality thumbnail? I've found this in the API docs - http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html#youtube%5Fdata%5Fapi%5Ftag%5Fmedia:thumbnail but it doesn't detail how to use the media tag.

Answer 1

There is a "maxres" version as well, which is a "full hd" picture in case that the video resolution is high enough.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/maxresdefault.jpg 

However, if the video resolution isn't high enough, this image doesn't seem to be created. So you might want to have a function that shows a lower quality version in case the "maxres" version doesn't exist.

Check out How do I get a YouTube video thumbnail from the YouTube API? for more info.

Answer 2

Thanks, Johan for answer.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/maxresdefault.jpg

If you also want set playback to HQ use Javascript API https://developers.google.com/youtube/js_api_reference?hl=fi-FI#Playback_quality

var qualityLevels = self.players[iframeID].getAvailableQualityLevels();
/* Set highest quality */
self.players[iframeID].setPlaybackQuality(qualityLevels[0]);

In order for this to work we first need to call:

self.players[iframeID].playVideo();

Then it will triggrer

self.players[iframeID] = new YT.Player(iframeID, {
                        events: {
                            'onReady': function(event) {
                                var iframe = $(event.target.getIframe());

                                self.players[iframe.attr('id')].loaded = true;
                            },
                            'onStateChange': function(event) {
                                var iframe = $(event.target.getIframe());
                                var iframeID = iframe.attr('id');

                                if(event.data == 1) /* playing */
                                {
                                    var qualityLevels = self.players[iframeID].getAvailableQualityLevels();

                                    if(self.players[iframeID].getPlaybackQuality() != qualityLevels[0])
                                    {
                                        /* Set highest quality */
                                        self.players[iframeID].setPlaybackQuality(qualityLevels[0]);
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    });

Answer 3

Example:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/xjFouf6j81g/hqdefault.jpg

where xjFouf6j81g, videoid