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Vimeo, the YouTube alternative?

Posted 10th May 2010 by Andrew     Email article      Share article

Recently more and more of the design/video/media sites and blogs I visit seem to be embedding videos from Vimeo.com. Not to be one who likes to miss a trick I signed up to Vimeo to check it out, both with a personal account and with a Media Lightbox account (http://vimeo.com/medialightbox). At the moment there are only two videos uploaded, but many more will be getting added very soon.

First impressions
In general I was very impressed by the Vimeo site. It’s clean, colourful (in a good way) and yet very professional. Signing up was very easy and once logged in I was able to change my profile, add a video and edit it’s details extremely quickly.

Digging a little deeper into the Vimeo site one thing stood out a mile… Vimeo will not host any commercial videos, gaming videos, pornography or anything else not created by users (including all videos users have ripped from TV i.e. most YouTube videos!). The comments made on videos also took me by surprise, as it seems that Vimeo has become a place to post and discuss your work and your passions making it a much richer site than YouTube for video content.

Video quality
When researching into Vimeo I discovered that it hosts the highest quality user video on the internet! Vimeo offers up to 5,000 kbits whereas YouTube delivers around 2,000 kbits, of course you’re not always going to get 5,000 kbits with Vimeo but the footage does look noticeably smoother than the 2,000 kbits YouTube videos.

Uploading video
Vimeo can cope with just about any video file you upload (as can YouTube) but whereas YouTube has set a maximum length of 10 minutes to any one video and no file can be larger than 2GB in size, with Vimeo there is no maximum length of footage but the maximum file size is only half the size at 1GB (with the basic Vimeo account you’re only allowed to upload 500MB per week tho)

Embedding video
One of the things that impressed me most about Vimeo is how professional your embedded video looks… especially when you compare it to YouTube. The video player controls is embedded into the video itself and disappear after a few seconds making your viewing experience much better, unlike YouTube’s controls which sit it the bottom and look second rate in comparison. When you go to embed video there is also a lot of customisation you can do, i.e. video size, colour of player controls and much more.

Conclusion
With over 1 billion views each day, YouTube is a much powerful tool for getting your video seen by the masses than Vimeo will ever be. But if you are more about video quality, maybe even wanting to appear more professional with great embedding and control options Vimeo is the way to go.

And for quick and user-friendly video file upload software and secure file hosting for your media formats, register now for a 500MB FREE account with MediaLightBox.com.