Is there a function or method to retrieve the video thumbnail from the video URL without adding the field to the node? I need to programatically get the video thumbnails for all videos that were included in a text field for display elsewhere in the site.

I can use the method specified here:
http://drupal.org/node/1302708

But it would be a hack for what I'm doing. I'm looking to call the function that returns the information containing the video thumbnail directly, passing the video url. This would be much cleaner.

Thanks for any tips, this has been a struggle all afternoon.