Vimeo Now Adds HTML5 Player

Vimeo Now Adds HTML5 Player

As if to immediately follow suit, Vimeo announced yesterday that they were making an HTML5 player available. It is beta, possibly a step up from YouTube’s ‘experimental’ player. (Knowing Google, experimental is RC material though.)

There are some limitations with Vimeo’s player as well. You must be using Safari, Chrome or IE with ChromeFrame installed, just like with YouTube. No full screen, like YouTube. Sensing a trend here?

For full screen, I’m not certain if it’s a limitation of current browsers, or if the HTML5 standard isn’t quite there (I lean toward the browsers). But either way, this is a nice step forward in moving away from flash.

Vimeo says that 90% of the videos uploaded in the past year are available to watch using the HTML5 player. 35% overall are available.

About the Author

Jonathan is a self-proclaimed geek who likes pretty much anything tech-related. He is especially into Linux, but is interested in Apple and Microsoft tech as well. Jonathan is also into a little bit of gaming - he owns a PS3 and a Wii, but with his limited budget only owns a handful of games for both consoles. For money, Jonathan works at a large engineering firm. He works in a datacenter as part of a group of 3 managing about 200 servers (and growing!), most Microsoft, some Linux and about half are virtualized using VMware.