This video has been declared a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by evil_disco_man.

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Tired-of-the-Same-Old-Pizza-Try-Vertical-Pizza

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the reply.

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
If a video has the logo of the video host rather than a frame from the video, the invocation will cause siftbot to try to locate a true thumbnail from the video host.

It would be a ridiculous waste of our resources (load, most of all) for us at most any user's will to download an entire Flash video onto our servers then parse it looking for a few frames just so you could have one of your choosing. I guess no one else has suggested it because they realized it's not very feasible and is worth much less than the problems it would create. The most common similar suggestion has been that people snap their own screenshot, crop it, and upload it for the video. This is a better solution but opens a gaping hole for abuse.

If the video host has the thumbnail, we should be able to get it. There are only a couple approved hosts we can't retrieve thumbnails for. And sometimes the thumbnail fetch just fails at video submit time but will work later for a *findthumb.

(It doesn't always not work.)

In reply to this comment by shuac:
How, exactly, does this invocation work? Does it actually DO anything? Where does it look for thumbnails? Seriously, where is it looking?

Can't it sample a bunch of frames from the flash video itself, offer those samples, and allows us to choose one?

I can't possibly be the first person to think of this.

In reply to this comment by siftbot:
A different thumbnail image for this video could not be found for findthumb request by shuac.