Vimeo is a very good place to host your videos, whether you are an independent filmmaker (free or Plus) or a business (Pro or Streaming). A Vimeo publisher enjoys category leading encoding along with a great admin interface and the lowest hosting and bandwidth pricing on the entire planet. YouTube is free but has many limitations, putting both advertising and YouTube branding on your company videos. Vimeo Pro is almost free ($200/year) and has very, very few limitations. Hence, we’ve always prioritised Vimeo hosting in FV Player as it’s the easiest and most affordable way for a small business to publish video.
Alas, no service in the world is perfect and Vimeo is no exception – it sometimes has a downtime or perhaps suffers from a DDoS attack. Last time it happened was today at about 4 PM UTC.
With our FV Player Pro we let you embed your Vimeo videos as we believe you should be able to present the videos on your website in the way that you like – without having to use the Vimeo iframe code. That way we can give you all the custom controls you need, add video transcript or make the videos much harder to download.
Sometimes a Vimeo video embedded with FV Player won’t play. All you get is:
Then we get some complaints. But since we do monitor Vimeo servers we know when this happens it’s usually an error on the Vimeo side, unfortunately.
If you ever run into such issue, just try to open any video on Vimeo website and you might find there is no player at all:
In the above screenshot the player cannot be seen, as these “config” requests visible in the Network tab in the browser Developer Tools have failed. Something went wrong and https://player.vimeo.com stopped responding.
Or if you try to open the URL from the iframe embed code, you would just get:
Oops! That wasn’t supposed to happen. Please try again in few minutes.
The best place to test if the issue is with Vimeo or with your own website or FV Player itself is to test playback on https://player.vimeo.com. Player.Vimeo.com is very important as not only it’s used for API calls from vimeo.com website, it’s also used for the iframe embed codes and also for the Vimeo Pro File URLs – which let you use a third party player to play Vimeo videos.
Another place to check is the Vimeo status page on vimeostatus.com. If it seems they do not know about the issue, just drop a line to VimeoStaff on Twitter. And of course, we are available in our support forums.
History of Vimeo failures
Looking at that status page on vimeostatus.com it looks like there is a failure once per month:
Our Vimeo API check reports the same, but also a couple more 2 minute downtimes. These appear to caused by some connection issues between the Vimeo and our monitoring servers:
As we said, in an ideal world no hosting service would go down. In the meantime, if you do run into issues with Vimeo playback with either FV Player or another Vimeo player, we hope these tips will help you figure out very quickly if it’s just a Vimeo issue or if you should investigate your own infrastructure.
Martin Viceník
Martin graduated as an engineer in Computer Science from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. He grew up in Liptovský Mikuláš in northern Slovakia next to the beautiful Tatra mountains. He is the developer behind our FV Player.
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