YouTube Video Previews in Chrome

YouTube Thumbs is an extension for Chrome that displays preview of a YouTube video when you hover the mouse pointer over it. The extension grabs thumbnails of the video at different play times – thumbnails that YouTube automatically generates for each uploaded video – then cycles the thumbnails over and over again with a small delay between each thumbnail image, creating an animated preview of the video. This is how it looks like.

youtube-thumbs

Pretty slick, isn’t it?

If you are wondering how to get those thumbnails, here is how.

  1. Get the video ID of a YouTube video

    youtube-video-id

  2. Copy the URL below and paste it in your browser’s address bar

    http://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/#.jpg

  3. Replace VIDEO_ID with the video id you got in the first step. Replace # with a number (1,2,3 …)

Here is the first thumbnail (http://img.youtube.com/vi/SYKnTeclmOs/1.jpg)

1

the second thumbnail (http://img.youtube.com/vi/SYKnTeclmOs/2.jpg)

2

the third thumbnail (http://img.youtube.com/vi/SYKnTeclmOs/3.jpg)

3

And what happens when you put in ‘0’? You get a bigger thumbnail.

0

Ain’t that nice?

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