So how did I get this crap image as the first frame of a YouTube video? Well I will show you so you can do the same thing!
Find a video you want to embed. For this example I will use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0FAaah8jgY
Note and copy its “video_id”, which in this case is “U0FAaah8jgY” from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=**U0FAaah8jgY**
Get the video’s “t-code”. This can be done by doing a view source of the video page and looking for the code between “&t=” and the next “&” in a section that has this. In our example, this “t-code” would be “OEgsToPDskJXsoy4CQ56hZR-A204DL4a” from id=U0FAaah8jgY&l=209&t=OEgsToPDskJXsoy4CQ56hZR-A204DL4a&s=21556AB
Now create the image you want to use and upload it to your site or an image hosting site. I would recommend using a JPG with dimensions of 425 x 325. Anything with a proportion that is away from that will look stretched out and not so nice. Copy the URL for your image.
You are now ready to produce the code. In the following piece of code, replace with your video_id from step 2, with your t-code from step 3, and with your image from step 4. Note that your image URL should NOT have the http:// in there.