Question about YouTube cover art

MusicBrainz
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1

Can a print screen from youtube be used for cover art? It is not an official cover but the start of a youtube clip

2

I donā€™t know because I donā€™t edit YouTube releases, but about getting a good image, if you have yt-dlp command line tool ā€“ available on Linux, Macintosh, Windows ā€“ you can use:

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-thumbnail --convert-thumbnails png <YouTube video ID or URL>

Use png because CAA does not support WebP images yet.

Otherwise a web search like youtube thumbnail downloader should help. :wink:

2 Likes
3

My question is really about a print screen. Since there are no covers on youtube are you allowed to use a print screen of the youtube clip.

Thanks any way Jees

4

For info, I tested yt-dlp --skip-download --write-all-thumbnails and the best PNG from there is binary identical as the --convert-thumbnails png (best) command shared before.

Apparently best command:

yt-dlp --skip-download --write-thumbnail --convert-thumbnails png <YouTube video ID or URL>

To answer your last post, there is always a ā€œcoverā€ for YouTube videos, itā€™s called the thumbnail. :wink:

3 Likes
5

Ah oke now I understand, ty

6

were you able to tell that I used yt-dlp to get that cover art or is that just a coincidence? But yes thatā€™s what I did exactly.

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7

Oh itā€™s coincidence because I donā€™t know what edit it is about.

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8

So what I am seeing now is people downviting the upload of a youtube thumbnail, even though it has a higher quality than the spotify thumbnail. They argue that it is clearly not the cover, but for a difital realese nothing clearly is ā€˜theā€™ cover. There are thumbnails only.

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109682045

9

If the concern is quality ā€“ iTunes usually has much higher quality images than Spotify, and it is certainly true for this release, so I went ahead and added that.

3 Likes
10

Actually it is about including all versions into the datebase somewhere, whether on a seperate release or on the same release doesnā€™t matter to me but dismissing any version because it isnā€™t square or because it was only on youtube is non-sense to me.

Thanks for adding the higher res version, that one should replace the low res version which should be removed, but the youtube version is visually different and in my opinion that means it should be added alongside.

And to clarify: not talking about a print screen but about an image which was created to represent the upload.

Here is a list of examples

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109716254
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109716199
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109716083
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109716053
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109715988
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109715935
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109715926
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109715827
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/109681584