Our video oriented theme Focus: https://siteorigin.com/theme/focus/ uses Featured Images (http://en.support.wordpress.com/featured-images/) in the following locations:
Home Page Slider: http://demo.siteorigin.com/focus
Home and archive/category page thumbnails: http://demo.siteorigin.com/focus
Single post video player backgrounds: http://demo.siteorigin.com/focus/2013/02/20/ferrari-458/
If you regularly add new videos you might want the ability to automatically create thumbnails. By default Focus doesn’t have this feature. Below is a brief description of you can add it using the Video Thumbnails plugin by Sutherland Boswell.
1. Install the Video Thumbnails plugin. You can either download it from the plugin directory: http://wordpress.org/plugins/video-thumbnails/ and install via PluginsAdd NewUpload OR you can search for it via PluginsAdd NewSearch.
2. Once installed and activated, head to SettingsVideo Thumbnails and scroll down to the Custom Field (optional) setting. Focus uses an array to store the video URL so it isn’t possible to use an existing custom field here. Instead, add your own field name. It can be anything; I’ve used:
video_url
Save.
3. Head to your first post and click the Screen Options drop down in the top right of your screen. Check the Custom Fields box and scroll down past the Visual Editor to Custom Fields.
4. Add a new custom field, its name should match the name we just set under SettingsVideo Thumbnails, in our demo case:
video_url
5. Insert your video URL into your new custom field and save the post.
(If needed you can run ToolsBulk Video Thumbs to regen the thumbs for all of your posts)
If you have any questions regarding this augmentation of Focus, let us know below.