I think I’ve been pretty transparent about my love of Vimeo in the past; frankly put, I think they’re the best video site on the web… and I don’t award that title flippantly. You’d be hard pressed to find a site that could provide your ministry with better video quality and features for Vimeo’s ridiculously low yearly fee.
With that said, they upped the ante last week by unveiling a universal embed-able player for Plus subscribers that works on pretty much any browser/device in existence. Whether it’s an iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android device, Mac or PC, your video’s going to play. Pretty fantastic right?
Check out the video below in whatever browser you can think to throw at it… Vimeo will automatically adjust to display it in the best possible format.
If you’re not using Vimeo yet for your ministry, I simply can’t recommend it more. Go sign up for Vimeo Plus today.
Vimeo is pretty sweet, and their new embeddable everywhere player sounds awesome, but being that I am prone to not wanting to pay for such services, I stick to building my own player. Currently I use one called Video-JS which is an HTML5 video player with a Flash fallback. I’ve tested it, and like Vimeo’s player, it works everywhere, only difference is that I don’t have to pay to have this feature.
Does it fall all the way back to IE 6?
I ♥ Vimeo.
Preatty spectacular. I don’t know why video services don’t do this. If your videos don’t work on iphone/ipad, WTF are you doing!
I was waiting for this one. Super juiced about it. Now if only they would up the 2GB upload limit. Some of our sermons get a little longish;-)
Sadly, I think the limit is still only 1GB per file, which kind of sucks, especially since they support unlimited HD plays now. If our messages were only 3 minutes, we’d be in good shape
[...] MediaSalt highlights a HUGE reason to get a VimeoPlus account. If your ministry can afford $60 a year, then do it. [...]
@Eric,
It has a flash player fallback, so yes, even IE6 gets some lovin with video js.
See: http://videojs.com/
Jonathan:
Do you have to render multiple video formats to use with the player, or just one?
You’d have to render out at least 3 to cover all the major browsers. MP4 for Chrome/Safari, Theora for FF and FLV for IE. WebM is still a hard one to find a way to convert to. But luckily Chrome supports MP4 just fine.
So sure, Vimeo automatically takes care of transcoding for you, but I could automate the process for use with my player.
The point is, with a little extra effort up front I can do the same as Vimeo offers and save money in the long haul.
The real selling point of a service like vimeo is bandwidth. If your video is going to generate high traffic, then you probably wont have the bandwidth to handle it.
Since my videos generally are not viewed often, I don’t worry about it. In the case of your church though, Vimeo is the clear winner, not because of the “play anywhere” feature, but because they have the infrastructure to keep your videos playing.
Hmm, $60 a year doesn’t really break my bank and is really not that much of an issue when Vimeo gets you automated conversions, decent bandwith, HD, automated counters and a slew of other nifty features. Sure, it shows its branding but in the long run, I think folks don’t really mind this. Is this really comparable? I guess if I just want to create my own solution and have total CONTROL, Video JS and other video solutions are top candidates. Otherwise, I can see Eric’s award is totally deserved…
Here’s the issue,
this uses an iFrame which doesn’t always play nice with websites. You may need to install an extra plugin in wordpress to get it to work and the videos don’t show up in the RSS feed anymore.
Both of these are big problems. I love the idea, but i hate the iFrame.
also if you want a video player that you need to create 1 file and have it work on all devices, check out mediaelementjs.com
vimeo. it’s good.