- Apr
- 25
Why I love Vimeo. (Sorry YouTube)
// Posted in Reviews, Video
I signed up for Vimeo after I had my first and final frustrated moment as a YouTube user. Vimeo is truly a site driven by user created content. You won’t find any episodes of South Park, you won’t find and poor movie rips, or porn, or music videos that someone simply filmed off their tv screen. You will, however, find original videos like this one below. RG linked this in a comment on my last post, but I thought it deserved more shine than that.
Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo
If you’d like to know a little more about why I prefer Vimeo over YouTube, continue reading. RANT WARNING
My experience with YouTube is probably not a frequent one. I don’t think it’s a terrible service, I just had several issues with them. All of these same issues were the very reasons I signed up for Vimeo. Let’s break it down, here.
YouTube Sign Up:
To sign up for YouTube, 10 fields, one of which is a captcha I can barely read and an annoying checkbox that, if overlooked, signs me up for some newsletter I don’t want. So, now I’m done, right? I can start uploading videos. Wrong. Email validation! Of course! Not a big deal, right? Well, the email came, I clicked my link… and nothing. I still just continue to get the same validate your email page. I close my browser, clear all of my cache load YouTube again, and after validating again it seems to understand I’m a human now.
Vimeo Sign Up:
5 fields, no captcha, no newsletter, no validation, just 5 fields. I can start uploading videos, right now.
YouTube Video Upload:
Let me reiterate, I understand that my experience does not represent that of most users. Never the less, here is my problem; I’ve finally made it to the upload video page, I’ve carefully chosen my video and have started to upload it. No go. There was some unknown error with my video upload and so it failed. Try again: fail. Ok, I’m using Safari, maybe that’s the problem. Firefox try: fail. Ok that’s it, I’m done.
Vimeo Video Upload:
I’ve got my video, I click upload, a few minutes later, poof. Video.
YouTube Video Posting:
Alright, so I couldn’t successfully upload a video, but I found one that I’d like to put in a blog post. Easy, right? I’ll just click “Post Video”. Oh wait, I have to have a verified blog? Ok… hmm better go search for my WordPress API Key. That should be it right, Username, Password, API Key? No! My password is “wrong” and by “wrong” I mean, it’s absolute correct, it just contains a special character, a character that YouTube will not accept, right or wrong. So, I changed my WordPress password! Ridiculous! My blog is eventually verified. Do I get to post it on my blog now? No! I click post, and nothing happens. A half hour later I receive an email from YouTube saying my video could not be posted. Awesome. That was the end of my YouTube user days.
Vimeo Video Posting:
I click embed, I’m given a snippet of code that I can post in whatever the hell blog I want. I post in my WordPress blog, done.
I almost forgot to mention Vimeo’s great clip view tracking graph.
Vimeo: 4
YouTube: 0
If you think you may enjoy a prettier, cleaner, more functional video sharing experience, please, try Vimeo.
// Apr 4, 2007 @ 9:49 am
Whew! Glad I got that off my chest!
// May 5, 2007 @ 12:13 am
I’m also using Vimeo, and I’m having a heck of a time trying to post videos to a group WordPress-powered blog. Either with the Code editor or the regular (i.e. not Rich Visual Editor), it strips out the “embed” tag altogether. How do you post your Vimeo videos with WP? Do you use a plugin or some sort of workaround?
// May 5, 2007 @ 12:12 pm
I’ve found that there seems to be a bug in WordPress to this effect. The Rich editor seems to be the culprit. It seems that if you switch to code view, paste in your embed tag and then switch back to regular rich text editing, the embed tag gets lost. Somewhere in the switch, it forgets what to do with it. I’ve found that if I simply use the code editor, or (if you prefer the rich editor) type all your content as normal in the rich editor and then switch to the code editor and paste in your embed tag, last, everything turns out just fine. This is my experience with it, at least. Certainly something for WordPress to try and fix.
// May 5, 2007 @ 7:36 am
Erika, Many thanks! It is now working for me also!
Jon :-)
// Jun 6, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
You may also want to check out Jumpcut. I had no problems with sign up, uploading or video posting.
// Jul 7, 2007 @ 3:56 am
OOOOOO you’ve found Amanda’s video))))
well i’m using youtube, first of all cause i can download videos with help of “some” programs. but soon i will also get a vimeo, just not to be like others.
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