We start out with a link to a video on YouTube. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8

We could make that a link, but that would be a bit lame for our blog

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8)

I think we’d like to have a video player within the page, but Markdown doesn’t support that. (Yet?)

So we’d want a thumbnail. The id of this video is 5pV9RE7Obj8, so the URL of the thumbnail is https://img.youtube.com/vi/5pV9RE7Obj8/0.jpg, so we can get the image into the blog with

![ALT TEXT](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5pV9RE7Obj8/0.jpg)

And because an image can be the text of a link, we can combine them.

[![ALT TEXT](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5pV9RE7Obj8/0.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8)

So far, you can do all of this by hand, but we still have the ALT TEXT problem.

I solve that with Perl and Mojolicious.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict ;
use warnings ;
use utf8 ;
use feature qw{ say signatures } ;
no warnings qw{ experimental::signatures } ;

use Mojo ;

map { make_md( $_ ) } @ARGV ;

sub make_md ( $string ) {
    return unless $string =~ m{^https?://www.youtube.com}mix ;
    my ( $id ) = $string =~ m{v=([^\?\&]+)} ;
    my $link   = qq{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$id} ;
    my $thumb  = qq{https://img.youtube.com/vi/$id/0.jpg} ;
    my $title  = 'ALT TEXT' ;

    my $dom = Mojo::UserAgent->new->get( $link )->res->dom ;
    $dom->find( 'title' )->each(
        sub {
            my $e = $_ ;
            $title = $e->text ;
            }
            ) ;

    say qq{[ ![$title]($thumb)]( $link ) } ;
    }

The usage of this looks like:

ytmarkdown.pl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8 foo bar blee

and it drops anything that doesn’t look like a YouTube link. When it has a link, it handles all the formatting stuff mentioned, plus uses Mojo::UserAgent to get the HTML and Mojo::DOM to extract the title to be used as hover text.

[ ![GLOSSY ThunderTalks 2015 10 10 - What I Learned From perlbrew - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/5pV9RE7Obj8/0.jpg)]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV9RE7Obj8 )

Which gives us a nice thumbnail for the link with ALT text.

GLOSSY ThunderTalks 2015 10 10 - What I Learned From perlbrew - YouTube

(And a subtle push for a talk I gave on how contributing to Open Source can benefit you.)

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to hear it. Ask me on Twitter or make an issue on my blog repo.