YouTube embedded video: set different thumbnail

Question

I want to embed a video from YouTube that is not mine (so I can not change it at YouTube). The video has a thumbnail that is not representative for the video (I refer to the

Answer 1

This solution will play the video upon clicking. You'll need to edit your picture to add a button image yourself.

You're going to need the URL of your picture and the YouTube video ID. The YouTube video id is the part of the URL after the v= parameter, so for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DODLEX4zzLQ the ID would be DODLEX4zzLQ.

Be sure to replace URL_TO_PICTURE and YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID in the above snippet.

To clarify what's going on here, this displays the image on top of the video, but allows clicks to pass through the image. The script monitors for clicks in the video iframe, and then hides the image if a click occurs. You may not need the float: clear.

I haven't compared this to the other answers here, but this is what I have used.