[nerbert]

No, no , no, your your code will never work. You're putting php code in a bb code tag and it simply won't work.

It's possible to do this but the question is how important is this feature? You're posting in the vB3 forum, what version are you using? You'll probably have to upgrade sooner or later to vB4. vB3 won't be supported forever and older versions require PHP 4, which is obsolete. My hosting service made PHP 4 available for a while after upgrading to PHP 5 but eventually quit.

The reason I ask about this is vB4 has a built in video bb code and it wouldn't be very difficult to modify it and then add some JavaScript to the showthread page to switch from a default image to the video for premium members. But this would affect all videos, there wouldn't be a distinction between some videos for everyone and special videos only for premium members. Trying to do this for vB3 would also be possible but when you eventually upgrade to vB4 I'm not sure how to fix all your old threads. But I can't test anything in vB3 now that my hosting service no longer uses PHP4.

Now, on the technical side, the reason this is so messy is that whenever you post a new reply, the bb codes are parsed (i.e., translated) into html and the parsed version is stored in the database and that's what is used whenever the thread is displayed. Once it's parsed it's too late to check what usergroup the viewer belongs to, everyone sees the same thing. So to make this work you would have to have both the image and the video in place but the video is inside a <div style="display:none;">. Once the page is loaded JavaScript can run through all the posts, find the undisplayed videos and switch them to display block for premium members and then hide the images.