Why doesn't Google or YouTube offer live customer service?

Does anyone offer a "YouTube Video Still Frames Capture as a Service" API?

• I know I can get YouTube's own thumbnail, but the service I'm hoping to find would work something like this: 1. I do an API call, with a YouTube URL/ID or direct YouTube video URL as the input. 2. The service captures a few stills from different points in the video (e.g. the first frame, the middle frame and the last frame). 3. I get the image files in return - I don't necessarily need the service to host the images for me. From my understanding, something like FFmpeg would work well for this, but I'm hoping for an affordable (or even free), hosted service which is fairly easy to use. Sort of like http://url2png.com/ for YouTube videos.

• Answer:

  This question is answered here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7136035/possible-to-capture-still-frames-from-a-youtube-video in short (1) yes it's possible with FFMPEG but you have to use undocumented methods so a fragile solution (2) it's possible by screengrabbing the video on a dedicated machine, and processing the frame - but this is not very robust either. This post covers realtime capture. If you don't need to do this as the video is being played, I recommended finding a way to write the YouTube video to a local file (a ripper? - this may violate yt's TOS). From there you can use ffmpeg, just use it on the command line with the right parameters to extract a frame.