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VIMEO removed our ability to control playback quality - please email them with me.


DPStewart
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5 hours ago, Bioskop.Inc said:

Just tried the auto function on 2 different OLD iMacs and the default playback on both was 1080p!

V.surprised at this considering one is over 10yrs old & the screen isn't even 1080p!

Might be worth testing the feature out before crying bloody murder...

In North America it will NEVER default to anything other than "Auto" now. 
As was suggested earlier - it's likely that this new change has not been rolled out to Europe yet.

My tests (and others) are that it's auto-selecting a quality below what our connection could support. 
Their adaptive streaming is "playing it safe". Again, that's a good move if your primary goal is only to never have a video stutter for a viewer.

But remember they also removed buffering. 
Which means they took away the viewer's choice to simply pause it for a moment to let it buffer so they could then continue and watch in a higher quality than a 100% glitch-free adaptive stream can provide therm.

We're not saying that it's 100% worse in every single possible situation. It's not.
We're saying that the specific things we PAY Vimeo for instead of just using YouTube have been severely compromised.
 


 

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14 hours ago, DPStewart said:

In North America it will NEVER default to anything other than "Auto" now. 
As was suggested earlier - it's likely that this new change has not been rolled out to Europe yet.

My tests (and others) are that it's auto-selecting a quality below what our connection could support. 
Their adaptive streaming is "playing it safe". Again, that's a good move if your primary goal is only to never have a video stutter for a viewer.

But remember they also removed buffering. 
Which means they took away the viewer's choice to simply pause it for a moment to let it buffer so they could then continue and watch in a higher quality than a 100% glitch-free adaptive stream can provide therm.

We're not saying that it's 100% worse in every single possible situation. It's not.
We're saying that the specific things we PAY Vimeo for instead of just using YouTube have been severely compromised.
 


 

It has to have been rolled out in Europe - no reason it shouldn't as it is a web site after all, so every user has it, no exceptions.

Didn't know about the buffering & that's a seriously stupid thing to remove, as we all know that sometimes you need it for smooth playback - its gone!

I'm with you all the way, as my subscription (which I thought I'd turned off from auto renewing - hmmm!) started in Sept & I certainly wasn't told that this new function would be rolled out. If I had known I would have been quite happy to move to YouTube for free!

So now we are paying for extra upload file capacity & that's it! Fuck'em!

Why is it that at the moment so many companies etc. are trying to get one over on their customers? I've encountered this willful disrespect everywhere recently, from [so-called] paying clients and now from Vimeo! I just don't get this attitude where people & companies think its OK to just screw people over! Do they really think that people are just going to roll over?

I've been a bit fed up with Vimeo for a while now (kinda started when unchecking the auto renew function didn't work), it all feels like a bit of a racket. Just look at their Staff Picks - how the fuck does that work? I mention this cause some "picks" just seem to be financially motivated rather than showcasing something really good/original (you know, like to help out the small independant struggling filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker) - "Please give our video, which cost 50K to make, a Staff Pick. Because our company/band/whatever could really do with the extra advertising/influx of revenue!".

I know nothing that I've done should be highlighted, but some of the stuff that is.....well, just call me Mr. Cynical! 

HELLO YOUTUBE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Just got Vimeo's Newsletter emailed to me. It's basically a big pat on their own back. But one line seemed like an acknowledgment toward the complaints...

"We’ve also done our best to give creators as much control as possible over their videos and how they present them to their audience."

And that was it. 

To me it seemed like they acknowledge the complaints, but too bad because they have always tried. I would imagine it would take a drastic and huge movement of subscription cancellations for Vimeo to step back at this point. I assume all of the complaints were forwarded to the department who was the brain child of this new restriction... They will never admit fault, so unless a massive amount of subscribers unsubscribe and they see the drop in their quarterlies, it will be business as usual. 

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As said before in an older thread here on Vimeo, Vimeo has shifted its business model in the last couple of years. Their core business is no longer to provide a YouTube alternative and community platform for indie filmmakers. Nowadays it's mostly been used by film production companies for non-public, password-protected screeners from Pro accounts. This is where Vimeo makes its money, being paid for Pro subscriptions by nearly every film production and distribution company in the world. The public side of the website has become more or less a shell.

It's become standard practice for film festivals, distributors etc. to work with password-protected Vimeo videos. Since this is all about quick previews, not web video as the delivery medium, the switch to auto playback quality makes a lot of practical and business sense for them.

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