[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.