Featured image from video is broken

What aspects are broken for you? The saving/setting of an image after hitting save on the post? Display of things on the frontend? Corrupt images being imported and saved into the media library?

Can you provide the URL for the video(s) you’re trying with?

First, thanks for the quick response, it is much appreciated.

So my site basically aggregates fishing related Youtube videos (https:///www.fishin.life), content is generated via feedparser and some other things, and posted via python-wordpress-xmlrpc

From those posts, they’re piped to Buffer via wp-to-buffer (paid for version) after publishing.

A few weeks ago featured images suddenly stopped being generated. When I would inspect each individual post, the featured image box was just spinning for some reason. I checked permissions etc, all was sound.I thought it was related to new features that WP to buffer released, but after uninstalling that plugin and starting from a rebased config with a fresh install of your plugin, it still persisted.

Tonight I reverted back to WP 4.9.9 after reading that the plugin isn’t tested against 5.* etc, and everything was back to normal.

Let me know if I need to provide a more thorough walk through in recreating the issue but I’m pretty sure the defect existed after upgrading to WP 5*

We’ve done some testing on 5.x and we haven’t seen any issues outside of potentially needing to increase the size of post content we search through.

I can’t recall seeing a “spinning” featured image metabox, but I won’t say for certain it’s not a possible case.

Have you checked the media library to see if images from these videos are even in place there? Would still love to have some example URLs so we can test/check with them. I have a feeling it’s something specific to your site, possibly with javascript errors. It is more “advanced” than just me posting urls in the post content/visual editor areas.

I do want to say I believe you’re having issues with things, but I’m not yet convinced it’s an issue on our end. There are many factors in between at the moment.

By spinning I mean that when you click on one of the posts impacted by the defect, your browser sits there spinning as it’s querying for the feature image of the post, not a native function or anything.

I checked the media library to confirm they were not being generated. Historically (since about June 2018) your plugin has worked flawlessly. Another point of interest is that WordPress To Buffer recently released a feature that seemed similar to your plugin, so it’s plausible that there is some sort of contention being created between the two when posts are generated and it lines up with when the defect started. Anecdotal at best but I haven’t had enough time to refresh my staging environment and try to recreate the issue, I basically just confirmed that downgrading to the version your plugin supports corrected the issue.

Here’s an example of a post that generated the image on publish:
https://www.fishin.life/catching-aquarium-fish-for-your-fish-tank-at-home-diy/

Here’s an example of a post that was published but did not generate a default image:
https://www.fishin.life/new-years-eve-lower-illinois-river-trout-footage/

The examples probably aren’t very meaningful because the former was taken after the downgrade, the latter was before the downgrade.

I’m more than happy to give you guys an account on the instance to troubleshoot if it helps, just let me know where to send a onetimesecret or pgp or whatever with credentials. If that doesn’t work I will refresh my staging environment tomorrow and try to recreate the issue there. I’d be surprised if it’s my production configuration, the entire thing is codified and idempotent via Ansible with a well defined pattern. Thanks again for the help guys, love your product (when it’s working :))

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by mikerev.

At this point, i’m having to lean towards some sort of conflict and/or error occurring that’s preventing things from finishing like expected. I just tried both video URLs with my local dev site and they worked just fine and that was with WP 5.0.2

Any access creds you want to set up or send can be sent to [email protected], especially a test user to use.

I have this same issue. Should I start a new thread for it? The featured image was automatically generated but I have just tried to add a new post today and it is not working.

@jenjnif what parts are the parts that are failing for you? Are you getting images uploaded to the media library, but they’re not saving to the post correctly? Something else?

@tw2113 I am copying the vimeo url into a block and it embeds it but does not save the image to the media library.

Chances are that the current default 800 characters is proving to not be enough to find the URL.

I know we had this commit merged in on GitHub, but it hasn’t been part of a formal release here on www.ads-software.com yet

https://github.com/WebDevStudios/Automatic-Featured-Images-from-Videos/commit/59490fb48967a7060d95ec62766c820558856f59

It may also need touched up. Not sure how code savy you may be, but we can make use of the wds_featured_images_character_limit filter to amend how much our plugin will search through for a URL.

@tw2113 hey Michael, thanks for your help. The video is placed just after the title (the same as all the other posts) so it is well within the first 800 characters. It worked perfectly last week and as far as I am aware nothing was updated so it’s a little confusing. I programme a little bit but am not very familiar with wordpress.

What’s the video URL you’re using? That can play a part as well, and if anything, I could give it a test locally to see what I come up with. We also may not have appropriate regex to parse/find the version of the URL being used, making it simply not work in that case.

@tw2113 I have already posted quite a few videos but when this error occurred I thought I would try to add one of the posts again (that was already working) and when I tried to add it as a new post but with the exact same format and URL the video didn’t show up. However, now looking at it some URLS work and some don’t. hmmmm The URL is: https://vimeo.com/303273502/38813c5143

@jenjnif that video url is very likely the issue, and I don’t know vimeo’s platform well enough to say exactly why the url has the two parts.

Looking at Manta Ray Media’s video listing, most have smaller urls like https://vimeo.com/114093129 without the extra / and second numeral string.

So that’d be why it’s failing with that url, and if you have other similar ones with the 2 parts, those would be failing as well. Our code is only expecting and parsing out one, like the link I provided in the previous paragraph.

If the urls are private, then we may not be able to fetch for those, as I believe we need to be able to publicly gather data for them.

@tw2113 ahhh, I think might be right. Thanks for your help. I will have a look at the URLs and figure out why some of them have two parts and whether I need to change them or how to embed them as they are.

@tw2113 I have gained access to the Vimeo account (rather than just the links) and I have discovered that the videos which did not automatically produce a featured image were marked as private rather than public. Makes sense! Thanks again for your help with this.