Announcement and installation instructions
Readme

Videothumb gives you the option of getting back a thumbnail of the video on a given url instead of that page. So if you thumbnail Simon’s Cat ‘Cat Man Do’ you can get

instead of
.

Videothumb gives you a thumbnail from the beginning of the movie (this may change) one from 1 second and one from 5 seconds, and all the normal sizes made from the first first frame snapshot.

To enable videothumb for your requests just add a videothumb tag to yours requests like:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q</url>
                <videothumb>1</videothumb>
	</request>
</webthumb>

If a supported video url isn’t detected a normal thumbnail will be created, so you can easily enable videothumb for all your requests.

Videothumb currently only works with youtube but I will be adding support for a bunch of other sites over the next couple days.

Currently videothumb is only available as an addon to webthumb, but may be made available as a separate api with additional features if there is demand.

The servers will be getting new IPs during this time so assuming we don’t run into DNS problems everything should be back up in around 2 hours.

I will twitter the status of the outage since this blog will be down too.

Services affected include:

• Webthumb
• svn.pear.php.net
• phpdoc.org
• this blog
• My other random sites

If you are a webthumb customer and have any concerns email me at jeichorn at gmail.com
Hopefully I will have an alternate endpoint up during the outage, but I just heard about the data center problems 15 minutes ago so I’m not sure if i will get it up in time.

My first million took 564 days
This second million has taken 84 days

I’m also looking into Bemba, since it’s one of my WebThumb customers.

This feature was added due to a customer suggestion, if you have a suggestion let me know.

I would like to make a new version of the API at some point, the goal in that would be to handle errors cleanly as XML responses and too allow for other services to use the same end point. Of course an API update isn’t at the top of my list, I’m going to generate over 200,000 thumbnails this month (compared to 179,190 last month and an average of 61,000 per month last year)

This new demand has put scalability improvements to keep up with the growth as my next job to tackle (after these new docs of course :-).

First is the holiday sale, you can get your credits at a reduced price, so use this opportunity to stock up for your 2008 projects. The other present is some exciting new features.

Visual Effects

Visual effects are currently in alpha and allow you to create a thumbnail with a mirror image below, with a dropshadow, or with a border. There will likely be some small changes to these effects over the next few months. If there is demand I’ll also look into adding more effects and options to the current ones.

Effect thumbnails are 300 pixels wide, and are always PNGs, the effects are designed using transparency so they will work on any background color. Effects are a 2 credit feature. To add an effect thumbnail just add, an effect tag to your request. For example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<effect>dropshadow</effect>
	</request>
</webthumb>

The possible values for the effect tag are mirror dropshadow border
You can fetch the image using the fetch api by using a size of effect

Custom Thumbnail Sizes

Support for adding a custom thumbnail of any output size has been added. This is a 2 credit feature and is available by adding a customThumbnail tag to the request with a width and height attribute specified. Note that your exact height and width are used, so if you want to keep the aspect ratio you’ll need to do the match with the browser width/height you specify. For example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<customthumbnail width="120" height="120" />
	</request>
</webthumb>

You can fetch the image using the api by specifying a size of: custom

Custom Delay times for slow/flash websites

You may have noticed that with flash websites, all the flash content isn’t fully loaded before a snapshot of the page is taken. There isn’t an automatic fix for this, since I don’t currently have a method to figure out when flash is done, but an api solution has been added. You can add a delay tag to your request to specify the amount of delay between when the content is loaded by the browser and when snapshot is taken. The default delay is 3 seconds, the maximum delay you can set is 15 seconds.
Example:

<webthumb>
	<apikey>api key here</apikey>
	<request>
		<url>webthumb.bluga.net</url>
		<delay>2</delay>
	</request>
</webthumb>

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone

Leave comments if you have any questions/feature requests for WebThumb, and don’t forget about the API tester, you can use it to figure out any XML changes without having to write any code.