When hosting Google Video's on your site it can be handy to pull back the thumbnail for the video image. Currently there is no API for doing this so I wrote a method to do it for me. First I retrieve the RSS feed for the video. Then I pull out the thumbnail path from that feed.

        private static string GetGoogleThumnailPath(string contentID)
        {
            string path = null;
            // Fetch the RSS for the video
            WebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://video.google.com/videofeed?docid=" + contentID);
            req.Method = "GET";
            WebResponse response = req.GetResponse();
            XmlTextReader stream = new XmlTextReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument(stream);
            XPathNavigator nav = doc.CreateNavigator();
            XmlNamespaceManager manager = new XmlNamespaceManager(nav.NameTable);
            manager.AddNamespace("media", "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/");
            XPathNodeIterator iterator = nav.Select("/rss/channel/item/media:group/media:thumbnail/@url", manager);
            while (iterator.MoveNext())
            {
                path = iterator.Current.Value;
            }

            return path;
        }

We used this code on the Pets Best Community site. By the way if you are interested in Pet Insurance you can use my Promo Code: CISAKSON5 for a 5% discount. If you do not see the box to enter it on the Get a Quote page then it probably has automatically been applied through one of my links.