14 DAY TRIAL // Vimeo has introduced an embeddable HTML5-based ‘universal’ player. Users will be able to embed Vimeo videos which will work on a wide variety of devices and browsers, even if Flash is not present.
HTML5 has been heralded as the future for online video, but so far it has failed to gain any significant market share or support from the large video sites.
While both YouTube and Vimeo have HTML5 versions of their video players, up until recently, none of them were available for embedding on other sites.
"With the latest generation of browsers and devices, we've had huge demand for an embeddable player that works with HTML5 and on devices like iPad and iPhone," Andrew Pile, VP of Product and Development for Vimeo, said.
“The new embeddable code is highly scalable and allows us to continue to add support as new browsers and devices are released, for example serving HTML5 to IE9 and our Flash mobile player to Android phones running Flash 10.1," he added.
The new player will automatically adapt to the capabilities of the browser and the device. If you’re using a modern browser on the desktop you may get the HTML5 version of the player, streaming videos in the WebM format.
On a mobile device with no Flash support, like the iPhone or the iPad, you will also get the HTML5 player, but with videos encoded with H.264, the format supported by Apple.
This great flexibility should come in rather handy and should ensure that the videos you post on your blog or on your site will be available to as many people as possible and with the best possible experience for their device and browser.
Vimeo also introduced a “Watch Later” feature which, as the name implies, allows users to queue videos they can’t or don’t want to watch right away. It’s also a great way of piling a bunch of videos and then watching them in order uninterrupted.