14 DAY TRIAL // Vimeo has managed to survive in the online video hosting world by appealing more to budding filmmakers and the more artistic crowd, versus YouTube's "the more kitty videos the better" approach. And it's once again pandering to that crowd by enabling paid users to upload single files as big as 5 GB in one go.
Granted, a 5 GB file will eat up all of your weekly allowance even with a Vimeo Plus account, but it's good for about 2.5 hours worth of HD video, enabling wannabe filmmakers to upload even longer experimental flicks.
"A frequent request from Vimeo Plus members has been the ability to use your full 5 GB weekly quota for one video. Previously, terribly boring and uncool technical issues have prevented us from achieving this," Vimeo wrote.
"Now, we're proud to say that we've made a big breakthrough, and 5 GB uploads per file are here! This update is great for many reasons: it means filmmakers can upload full-feature films in HD, parents can upload an entire soccer game, and your Aunt Martha can upload 2.5 hours of HD video of her cat taking a nap!," it announced.
The feature is still in beta until Vimeo can work out all the kinks. There are a few caveats and known issues as well, for now.
One is that the 5 GB per file uploads only work with the new Ajax uploader, not the regular Flash-based one and not with the desktop uploader. The desktop version does support bigger files than before, but it is only limited to 4 GB files. There are also some issues with Internet Explorer.
Until now, Vimeo Plus account holders had the same 5 GB weekly storage quota, but could only upload files no larger than 2 GB. Regular users have the same 500 MB per week limit. YouTube does not have a hard file size limit, but videos can only be 15 minutes long.