I am an editor, using the Youtube Player and my website displays the thumbnails in jpg since many years. I do that with success thanks to the videoId and the IMG HTML tag :
src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/'.$videoYtId.'/default.jpg"
It's working good, when I have a "broken" thumbnail, it is because the video is not available anymore.
Now, I want to use WebP, so I am doing the following change :
src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/'.$videoYtId.'/default.webp"
The most of the time, around 90-95%, it is working correctly. But sometimes it is not, it displays the broken thumbnail instead the good one. I know it's complicated to talk to Google, but clearly they have missed something. How to tell them to create the missing thumbnails ?
OK examples :
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gHMzOxaMqwM/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/gHMzOxaMqwM/default.webp
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b4ozdiGys5g/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/b4ozdiGys5g/default.webp
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/91fQTXrSRZE/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/91fQTXrSRZE/default.webp
NOK examples :
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-dToL8Y9clY/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/-dToL8Y9clY/default.webp
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bAjCIgPX95w/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/bAjCIgPX95w/default.webp
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6uBK5kvakD8/default.jpg & https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/6uBK5kvakD8/default.webp
ps : I cannot use any requests to test if the IMG is available or not to take the JPG or the WebP version, neither use the Data API ; I (and everyone I think) really need the missing thumbnails.