CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railshpricot
Brian Roisentul
Brian Roisentul

Reputation: 4750

How to get the thumbnail image from embedded video

I'm using Ruby on Rails 2.3.8 and Hpricot plugin for parsing HTML.

I would like to get embedded videos thumbnails, and searching on the internet I figured out that youtube and vimeo at least uses OG (open graph) protocol, which provides meta tags that contains the video info (url, thumbnail, etc).

For example, if I had this video, I could read the following meta tag, using Hpricot plugin:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/101/345/101345354_200.jpg" />

So, using Hpricot I should be able to parse it as follows:

video_url = "http://vimeo.com/16430948"

video_page = Hpricot.parse(open(video_url))

element = video_page.search("//meta[@property='og:image']")

But I get an empty element instead.

Note: if you searched for video_page.search("//meta"), it will find the one I want on the list...but using the previous syntax it won't.

Could anybody tell me how can I solve this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1624

Answers (1)

marv
marv

Reputation: 149

I came across this question whilst having a similar problem with Hpricot and meta data.

In the end I had to change the xpath from //meta to /html/head to get my scraping working. Trying the same here seems to work.

video_page.at('/html/head/meta[@property="og:image"]')['content']

Returns your image's URL.

Upvotes: 2

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