[enginous]

Let me get a little whiny and off-topic here: the video is beautiful, but I wish people mostly stopped using Vimeo until they make their player more resilient.

It doesn't seem to degrade video quality if your bandwidth is low, it seems that my bandwidth to Vimeo is generally lower than with YouTube, it handles buffering very poorly, it's jittery on some less powerful computers, and the player itself loads noticably slower than YouTube.

For this reason, I hesitate to share the video with others, even if it's great. People going through their feeds have better things to do than wait and give up on content I attempt to share.

[netcraft]

Like others have said, I have had the exact opposite experience - youtube buffers and moving around in the video (even inside of what seems to already been buffered!) will restart the buffer completely. Vimeo always seems to work perfectly, even over my mobile connection.

[petercooper]

Agreed. When I had 12Mbps down, Vimeo was a real borderline PITA to use and it seemed jumping to points in a video took 10+ seconds to actually occur whereas with YouTube you could jump around the video quickly. Now I have 70Mbps down, Vimeo is somewhat more bearable, but it's still not as good an experience as YouTube.

All that said, Vimeo's video always seems better quality to me, even if it slow to load or cumbersome to control. And I suspect that, like me, you're in Europe.. so that might also have a part to play.

[enginous]

Agreed on all counts, and I'm in Iceland. I also know that local ISPs have dedicated caching servers for YouTube videos, which gives them an advantage in my region.

I realize that it's very expensive to have great connectivity in all regions, and I definitely think they should focus on player improvements (which might of course involve considerable sever work, too) since my main beef is with how slow connections are handled by the player.

[incision]

Personally, my Vimeo experience has been consistently excellent for as long as I can remember from all manner of devices.

On the other hand, I find YouTube to be maddeningly inconsistent at times, particularly via Android devices.

[oatmealsnap]

I think that what you are perceiving as a "bad player" comes from Vimeo's focus on image quality over other factors. YouTube's compression algorithms are more lossy than Vimeo's, so there is less data to send. This is great for serving Justin Bieber to millions of people every day, but less good when you are a photographer showing off a macro photography reel. Longer load times are a fair tradeoff for most of Vimeo's customers.

I should add that I am in the US, and had no problem running that video on a modern computer, so I don't really how badly it was running on yours.

[enginous]

I think you're spot on that in general, the speed-quality tradeoff creates a legitimate case for content producers to choose Vimeo.

However, that's not really my complaint, but rather how slow buffering is handled by the player. In my case, the player responds to my low bandwidth by repeatedly attempting to play fractions of a second of choppy video at a time. When the player is struggling with buffering, I believe it should either downgrade the video quality or make me wait until I can watch the full video (or at least a few seconds of it) without interruption.

Strangely enough, even when the buffering progress bar makes it seem that I've loaded the next few seconds of the video, I'll get jittery video (as if the indicator is just wrong).

These are mostly player issues, and they're mostly what's putting me off about Vimeo. Now, I've been experiencing this for years on various computers and connections (of course, I don't remember the times where everything worked fine), but perhaps this is only affecting a fraction of users that I happen to belong to.

[BHSPitMonkey]

If I'm going to need to let a video like this one buffer for about an hour (on a very good connection) before hitting play, why doesn't the content creator simply find a place to host the original file and give me a download link? Otherwise, if their intention is to allow the public to stream it easily, they should probably just use YouTube.

[jvzr]

Well, I have the exact opposite experience. I guess it depends on where you live on the globe. :)

[wklauss]

Are you visiting the site from US, EU...? My experience is the opposite also. Youtube experience is good, but Vimeo doesn't show any buffering problems and bandwidth seems fine.

The last think I'd want is for Google to buy them, honestly. I think its good for everyone that theres an alternative platform to Youtube that revolves around a different style of videos.

[janinge]

Same (opposite as OP) experience here in one of the Scandinavian countries (on TeliaSonera's network). Buffering and seeking always happens almost instantly with Vimeo, and they deliver better video quality.

YouTube often fails to load videos here, and I have to switch between bandwidth settings (up/down, doesn't matter) to get things going.

[hnriot]

You can't blame Vimeo for you having a slow computer and a slow Internet connection. Vimeo is targeted at people who want a better quality experience than YouTube and it is assumed that you can keep up.

[treelovinhippie]

And ironically it's the higher-quality, higher bandwidth-intensive artsy videos that are uploaded there.

Google should buy them out, though I'm sure they've already gone down that path.

[btipling]

Vimeo is already owned by IAC.

[reeses]

Vimeo has room to improve, but I think it's a smart move to take the "premium" route compared to YouTube. I don't like publishing to YouTube unless it's recorded on my phone.

If they tried to compete with YouTube toe-to-toe, they'd probably not be doing as well. Think of it as 500px vs. Flickr or Facebook for photo sharing. You'll get fewer eyes on your work but they'll tend to be more discriminating eyes.

[Aloisius]

I have what is possibly the most jittery internet access in San Francisco and Vimeo works just fine. YouTube on the other hand, works terribly half the time and fine the other half.

Frankly, for videos like this, one shouldn't degrade the video quality if their bandwidth is low. The whole point of this video is the epic shots. If it low quality then, what is the point?

[jfb]

That's what youtube-dl is for.