Vimeo displays small thumbnail instead of large thumbnail

bknightly
(@bknightly)

4 years, 8 months ago

I’m having an issue with Vimeo videos displaying a small video thumbnail, even when a larger thumbnail is available. Since the plugin is grabbing a small thumbnail, the image is blurry and pixelated when displayed on the page, making for a poor presentation. I want to be able to grab the largest thumbnail available from the Vimeo video to improve this presentation.

Here’s the video URL:

https://vimeo.com/173021777

So the thumbnail image that gets pulled from Vimeo and displayed on the page is this one (at 640×268):

https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/579215742_640.jpg

I want to see this one instead (the same image, just at 2048×858) :

https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/579215742.jpg

How do I get Vimeo videos to display the largest thumbnail image available? I’m using the most current version of the plugin as of writing this post (v2.12.1).

Bonus Points:

I noticed there’s a meta box that gets added to whatever posts/pages/CPTs you designate plugin support to, entitled “Lazyload for Videos”, where you can designate the “Youtube Thumbnail Quality” to “Default”, “Standard quality”, or “Max resolution”. This there an equivalent meta box for Vimeo planned for a future update?

Thanks for any help you can offer, Sutherland Boswell. I’m a huge fan of this plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/video-thumbnails/

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

Plugin Author Sutherland Boswell
(@sutherlandboswell)

4 years, 8 months ago

That’s odd, typically I’d expect it to be at least 1280px wide like below.

https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/579215742_1280.jpg

I’m taking a look into this to make sure it always finds the largest available.

As for selecting image resolutions, I’ve written Video Thumbnails with the goal of always fetching the largest available resolution (I get feedback that images are both too small – and too big) instead of being able to select specific sizes. If you never need the images to be above a certain size, the pro version has a option that will downsize the image to your max dimensions.

You’re very welcome! Appreciate the kind words.

Thread Starter bknightly
(@bknightly)

4 years, 8 months ago

Interesting, I didn’t know there was a Vimeo video thumbnail generated at 1280px wide.

Big up for the reply and looking into this!

Thread Starter bknightly
(@bknightly)

4 years, 8 months ago

Hey Sutherland!

Have you had any luck yet figuring out how to get the plugin to grab the largest vimeo video thumbnail?

Thanks again!
jsndvn
(@jsndvn)

4 years, 7 months ago
Exactly the same issue here. I get a 640×360 thumbnail from Vimeo every time, even when specifying a 1080p version of the video via a url parameter, i.e. http://vimeo.com/180678668?quality=1080p

It works flawlessly with YouTube stuff, though I have to admit I haven’t tried any other provider yet.

Would love to see this fixed! The plugin is excellent otherwise and I’ll likely upgrade to pro in the not-too-distant future. Also, I’m happy to help if you need any more details to reproduce it.

Thanks!
- This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by jsndvn.
jsndvn
(@jsndvn)

4 years, 7 months ago

I have a kind-of fix for this after spending some time looking at how Vimeo’s API calls work. I say ‘kind-of’ because the highest resolution thumbnail I’ve managed to get it to return is 1280 wide, but that’s better than the 640ish it was before so I’ll take it for now.

So in

plugins/video-thumbnails/php/providers/class-vimeo-thumbnails.php

take a look at line 87 inside the get_thumbnail_url function block:

$request = "http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=http%3A//vimeo.com/$id

By appending a width parameter to that url you can request a higher resolution thumb, though it doesn’t seem to offer anything higher than 1280×720. So:

$request = "http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=http%3A//vimeo.com/$id&width=1280

Save the file with that small tweak and the plugin will now fetch a 720p thumbnail of any video that offers HD. I wonder is there some other parameter that can be passed to request > 1280 wide??

jsndvn
(@jsndvn)

4 years, 7 months ago

Should be

$request = "http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=http%3A//vimeo.com/$id&width=1280";

Plugin Author Sutherland Boswell
(@sutherlandboswell)

4 years, 7 months ago

The image from the OEmbed API seems to usually have a size appended to the URL like .../1234_1280.jpg and if you just drop the _xxxx part it should give the largest version available. I’m planning for the next version to do this, but you can try it yourself by finding the line

$result = $result->thumbnail_url;

and replace with

$result = preg_replace("#_[0-9]+\.jpg#", '.jpg', $result->thumbnail_url);

jsndvn
(@jsndvn)

4 years, 7 months ago

Many thanks for that, Sutherland. It works a treat.

Looking forward to the next version!