Sutherland Boswell

They could be setting it as a hidden custom field, which means there’s actually an underscore at the beginning. Try setting it to _video_html

“Automatically set thumbnail as featured image” should most likely be enabled (if your theme uses featured images), but that wouldn’t stop the plugin from at least finding the thumbnail.

The reason JW Player isn’t officially supported is because changing the standard player for videos makes the video more difficult to detect. At the moment I don’t have the time to create proper support for the JW Player plugin, but I can recommend storing the YouTube address as a custom field and then setting that custom field in Video Thumbnail’s settings. If you’re adventurous you could even try using this field to embed the video in your site.

So the plugin is finding the image when you publish the post, it just isn’t displaying it on the front end?

Yes, you’ll need to enter something in “custom field” if your theme has the embed code in a separate field. Somewhere in your theme’s code you should find something like get_post_meta($post->ID, 'key');, but ‘key’ will be equal to something else like ’embed_code’, and that is what you’ll enter in the custom field setting. If you can’t find what this value should be, ask the theme’s creator what the title of the custom field should be.

JW Player is not officially supported at this time. Can you get an example of how you embed? Do you use a shortcode like [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyuNjdSrV[/youtube]

@bsetter I’m not sure Vimeo’s thumbnail URLs will stay the same if the image is changed, so you might actually end up with broken images. I haven’t actually tested it, so let me know if that ends up being the case or not.

@ibalaban since his issue the plugin has been updated, so all you should need to do is choose the right post type in the Video Thumbnails settings page and enter the name of the custom field it stores your video in. This could be something like ‘video’ or ’embed_code’ but varies from theme to theme.

First thing I’d recommend is simplifying your code a bit. If you have the plugin set to save thumbnails to your media library and set as featured image, you can change all of this:

<?php if( ( $video_thumbnail = get_video_thumbnail() ) != null ) :?>
	<img src="<?php video_thumbnail(); ?>" alt=""/>
<? elseif(has_post_thumbnail()) : ?>
	<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
<?php else :?>

<?php endif;?>

to just this:

<?php if(has_post_thumbnail()) : ?>
	<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
<?php endif;?>

It’s possible that where you had <? elseif(... could be causing problems depending on your server’s php configuration.

Also be sure to check that your settings have the correct custom post type selected and the custom field blank.

Processing self hosted videos would likely require additional software on your server, so right now the plugin focuses on external services. I’d really recommend uploading to a service like Vimeo or YouTube anyways and then embedding it in your post, which can be done pretty easily from iOS. If auto-embeds are enabled in your WordPress settings, you can just post a link to the video and it will be converted to the proper embed code.