Really, it’s not. I love just about everything about Vimeo– I like the business plan, I like their attitude on the company blog, I like the community, I like the presentation, I like the commenting, the “Like” button, and the compression/encoding. It’s fantastic for what it is, but I don’t think that it is the end-all be-all for online video presentation. Sometimes you just want a simple window (and I mean that in the literal real-world pane-of-glass sense) to another place without the control panels, borders, and other components that are ubiquitous in online videos.
I am experimenting with the Brand New (and Exciting!) HTML5 <video> tag, and although I like it so far it is frustratingly time-consuming and complex to put up a video that is compatible with all browsers and devices. Firefox won’t play h.264 videos, Safari won’t play Firefox-compatible Ogg Theora videos, and IE8 won’t recognize <video> at all and must still rely on Flash (which still does have some good uses, despite the current smear campaign against it).
I eagerly await the day when I can put some simple markup in a blog post and have a gorgeous high-quality video show up on every browser that has the good fortune to navigate to it, but until that day comes along there is going to be a lot of Flash frustration from the iPhone crowd and codec frustration from the Firefox zealots (I’m just going to assume that people who use IE don’t care either way, and probably don’t read this blog).
In the meantime, here’s a looped Flash clip of the white blossoms outside of my front door (shot in glorious 23.976 fps on a 5D mk.2):
If you’re viewing this on your iPhone: Sorry.
If the OS of your $3,000 Mac decides to crap its pants and blames it on the Flash plugin: too bad.
:p
One Comment
Hello, lovely work on the video clips there! Also a sensible attitude towards video on the Web.
But I would like to note that even though for us Firefox users the codec issue matters (well, for the power users who know and care about such things), that does not automatically make us zealots. Just because I believe that Theora is ethically and legally the right choice does not mean I don’t understand business realities, or that I don’t recognize the superiority of H.264 in the purely technical sense. But what I believe most firmly is that this is a technical problem that can be resolved by technical means, and through cooperation of all sides, with an eye towards the legitimate reasons each side has for its stance on the issue.
Well, Google releasing VP8 into the public domain would also help. But in any case there’s a way out of here if cool heads manage to prevail.