Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format

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About a year and a half ago I took of my community’s website and rebuilt it from the ground up using the excellent program RapidWeaver. I wanted to create a site that was more flexible, could become an educational resource rather than just share facts and was easily updated in order to ensure that it was always relevant to my community. I also wanted to be able to share as many pictures and as much video as possible. The site was even built in such a way that when you go to it from an iPhone you are automatically redirected to an iPhone-friendly site. (It is amazing what some of the templates in RapidWeaver can do.)

One of the big, on-going frustrations since the iPad came out is that a site like ours loads beautifully but images and video that are embedded through Flash just leave big holes in the page. Well all that changed yesterday when Vimeo rolled out their new “Universal Player”. The new Universal Player

can automatically detect what kind of device is viewing the video and choose the optimum player based on the device’s capabilities. For example, it will serve mobile video to iPhones and Androids and HD to iPads and Desktops. On other mobile devices it can use the native player of the device or an optimized mobile Flash player with bigger controls. It also allows us to introduce new players as technology changes, potentially allowing us to do things like serve HTML5 to IE9 and WEBM video to Firefox.

It not only works but it works well and makes Vimeo, already an awesome service for hosting video, even better.

But it gets better. Vimeo also rolled out a new service called “Watch Later”. Watch Later adds a button to video that, when clicked, sends the video to a special album. Then, when you have time, you can go back and view all the videos you wanted to see but couldn’t at the time.

Finally, Vimeo has teamed up with Roku to bring “Vimeo on your HDTV”. That’s right, if you have a Roku player (I LOVE mine!) you’ll find a new Vimeo channel that will now let you watch all your videos on the big screen.

You can read all about the changes here on the Vimeo blog.

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About the Author

Dan Cohen
Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. Dan is married to Raina Goldberg who is also an avid user of Apple products. They live in New Jersey with their golden doodle Nava.

4 Comments on "Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format"

  1. Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format #gadgets http://bit.ly/d4lLm4

  2. RT @gadgetfreaks: Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format #gadgets http://bit.ly/d4lLm4

  3. gbmiii [ff] – Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format http://ht.ly/18CJsf

  4. gbmiii [ff] – Vimeo Adds Ability to Embed Video in iPad-Friendly HTML5 Format http://ht.ly/18CJse

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