Get Vimeo thumbnail for video using jQuery

I believe you're having the "same origin policy" issue. You should consider writing a server side script using something like "file_get_contents" or "fopen", enabling you to grab the data from vimeo, translate it to json, and output to your javascript with a nice ajax call.

If you would like to avoid using a server-side script you may use the data type JSONP.

var vimeoVideoID = '17631561';

$.getJSON('https://www.vimeo.com/api/v2/video/' + vimeoVideoID + '.json?callback=?', {format: "json"}, function(data) {
         $(".thumbs").attr('src', data[0].thumbnail_large);
});

Notice the URL is a bit different from how you are using it. The callback which you defined as a var is unnecessary. You're attaching the getJSON to a function directly, so you'll call the 'callback' in the url '?'. This informs the getJSON function to pass the successful data return to the supplied function.

You can test my code here. Hope it helps!

With the updated API, it would be...

$.getJSON('https://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=https://vimeo.com/' + id, {format: "json"}, function(data) {
  $(".thumbs").attr('src', data.thumbnail_url)
});