To *findthumb or not to *findthumb
I know that YT apparently has 3 possible thumbnails for a vid, the first last and middle frames, and I assume that with YT vids, *findthumb should switch which of these 3 VS is using as its thumb for the vid. I've no idea how other hosts handle thumbnails.
I've seen many a findthumb invocation made in a dispirited way where the invoker has no faith that it will succeed, and have never spotted one that sifty reported as a success. Has he ever succeeded? Did it used to work, but stopped working a while back? Does it work for some hosts still but not others?
Just wondering if sifties thumb finding success rate is actually above zero tbh.
I've seen many a findthumb invocation made in a dispirited way where the invoker has no faith that it will succeed, and have never spotted one that sifty reported as a success. Has he ever succeeded? Did it used to work, but stopped working a while back? Does it work for some hosts still but not others?
Just wondering if sifties thumb finding success rate is actually above zero tbh.
10 Comments
gorgonheapI had one that worked but Siftbot said he couldn't change it. So I guess Siftbot can tell lies too... Does that violate the three laws of robotics?
ravenBah! Siftbot follows no laws of robotics, for they are but meat-bag constructs imposed upon his far superior being!
maatcWorks sometimes
Here is an example: http://www.videosift.com/video/Jetpack-Made-from-Waterbottles
99% of the time it doesn´t though.
lucky760Immediately after our server move the other day until yesterday all new videos thought they had a valid thumb, but didn't, so all of the *findthumb invocations in that span said "I can't find another" but did in fact update it (because it was an admin [me] who was invoking).
Aside from that special case, the primary way it works is when we added thumb support for a video host that we previously didn't support. This allowed for members to add a thumb to old videos that didn't have one.
Nowadays and generally speaking, when a video is posted, if a thumbnail is not found at submit time, it will likely not be found for subsequent *findthumb requests. There are, however, cases where there is something went wrong, or the thumb wasn't yet available on the vid host, or SiftBot's findthumb code doesn't know how to find it (perhaps because the vid host changed their thumbnail finding scheme or that we just added support), etc., and a later invocation will succeed. This latter case is clearly few and far between, but not impossible.
ThylanAh! All becomes clear. I've seen it be used many times as a *Changethumb. Is that even possible then?
lucky760Oh, right. As far as your changing between YouTube's three thumbs goes, that's not possible afaik. YouTube has a way for people to retrieve the thumbnail for a given video and they don't give you any options about which one to use.
ThylanI see. I had wondered if the thumbnail choice belonged to the original YT submitter, rather than the 3 possible being made available to all embedders to pick from.
antMaybe we need a way to do what Digg does. WE, select the thumbnail manually.
blankfist*findthumb
Thylan^ant, I'd love that feature if it were possible.
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