brightcove thumbnails

Ok, so this a year on, is there a show stopping reason why this cant be done in the module, I take you were correct in assuming the JSAPI could be used, (http://studio.brightcove.com/library/howto/javascript-basics/) to grab the titleDTO to get the thumbnailURL?

We would love to have this feature, but for now I'm wondering if there was a major reason why you didn't add this (to save us pain of finding out later that its nigh on impossible for some reason).

I may look at sponsoring this as I am fresh out of time right now, so any feedback would be much appreciated.

After a bit of digging around i believe that there is something within Brightcove's business model that stops any non-authorised third party from accessing their thumbnails.

I see that the thumbnails have a url as such

which contains the channel id, videoid, and a md5sum (which apparently is the md5sum of the *original* uploaded video, so you cannot guess this one)

http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/d2/unsecured/media/372305144/372305144_41...

theres a couple of places that show brightcove's thumbnails such as

http://xml.truveo.com/rss?query=channel:%22Brightcove%22%20spider%20man%203

and

http://video.aol.com/video-search/query/Spider-Man%203%20Video%20Game%20...

truveo seems to have atleast a working RSS feed containing the thumbnails, however you cannot request a video from brightcove by the videos ID, so you need to rely on the title which is not so great. makes me wonder if they have a signed agreement or a smarter way of dealing with brightcove's content than the rest of us know about.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/brightcove-dev/message/1215

even more annoying is they DO offer a method to retrieve the thumbnail/title etc based on a videoID but you need to do via some javascript that talks to their flash plugin!

http://studio.brightcove.com/library/api/javascript/js-methods.cfm

And heres a rant..

How a company raises $60 million dollars in funding but leaves some of the most important parts of integration by third parties to a desktop/browser based level instead of ye` olde` traditional simple ways todo this really irritates me. I suspect this kind of behaviour is typical mentality of people who choose coldfusion for their business.

So i suspect the only "proper" way forwards is to..

- detect if a video is 'brightcove' on submit

- place their stupid flash player onto the page

- insert javascript to talk to the flash

- add a javascript hook to callFlash() with the videoID for the method that gives you the link to their freaking thumbnail.

- submit the page once the thumbnail url is aquired

- hope the thumbnail url doesnt change

They finally have a REST API, documented in part at http://help.brightcove.com/developer/docs/mediaapi/media-API.cfm and http://help.brightcove.com/developer/docs/mediaapi/objects.cfm. It would require getting an API Token Key, which I have applied for to test, but I believe we can FINALLY get (limited) Brightcove Thumbnail support...

http://blog.brightcove.com/blog/2008/11/brightcove-ends-free-network-ser...