Vimeo for UKOER resources

Overview: Vimeo is a social web site for video sharing, with a reputation for supporting higher (technical) quality, longer videos than YouTube. The emphasis is on sharing videos created by individual users rather than commercial videos. Socially, vimeo supports user profiles, commenting on video, individual contacts, and subscriptions to channels and membership of groups. Vimeo provides a RESTful API with data out in XML, JSON and serialized PHP.

Formats and Standards
The preferred video file type is mp4, though Vimeo supports the following file types: asf, asx, avi, divx, dv, dvx, m4v, mov, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, 3g2, 3gp, 3ivx and 3vx; they recommend the H.264 codec for .video and AAC for audio, they also support WMV3. Apple's ProRes codecs are not well supported. OGG Theora is not supported. Resolutions up to 720p HD (1280x720) are supported; videos at higher resolutions will be scaled down on uploading. A free basic account allows up to 500MB of uploads per week (and therefore limits the size of file), for a paid-for vimeo plus account there is a limit on the files size of 1GB. Basic account holders may only upload 10 files per day.

API
Vimeo divides its API into "simple" and "advanced" functionality; both are RESTful and return data in JSON, PHP or XML.

The Simple API allows an application to GET public data from vimeo about users, videos, groups, albums, channels etc. There is no authentication or authorization necessary. The advanced API allows access to private data and videos and allows new videos to be uploaded and data to be modified. Applications using the advanced API must have an API key and users must authenticate with OAuth. There is an official library implementing the advanced API in PHP. The user agents libwww_perl and python-urllib are banned, so applications based on these libraries need to identify themselves by setting a custom user agent field, it is best practice to do similar if using other common network libraries such as curl.

The vimeo API is well documented, with step-by-step instructions and examples, and supported by a forum, user group and blog.

Feeds
RSS 2.0 feeds are available listing all of an individual user's videos, or just those in a single channel, or all the videos from a user group, or all videos with a specified tag.

Other metadata
The simple API allows retrieval of most metadata; advanced api allows retrieval of some more specialized metadata and editing.

Collections and Grouping
Vimeo supports groups of people, channels of videos from an individual user and albums of videos collected by an individual user but not necessarily by that user. Members of a group may contribute videos to that group, which may be a useful way of aggregating videos from an OER project with several contributors. Basic account holders may have only one channel (which need not contain all that user's videos); Vimeo plus users may have more than one channel. Channels may be useful for collating OER videos related courses where there is only one contributor. Albums are created by a single user but may contain videos from other users, and so may be useful for collating resources relevant to a single course / OER provider with several contributors.

RSS feeds and the API will give details about videos in a specified group, channel or album.

Content export & embedding
Users with Basic accounts have the ability to make available their original source file for up to week from the upload date. After that time only the converted, MP4, version of the video will be available. "Plus" users always have the ability to make available and download their original source files. See "comments" below for limits on who can download how many resources.

Vimeo has a Flash video-player code named moogaloop. Copy and paste code is available to facilitate the use of this on third-party sites. Vimeo also supports the oEmbed API, an open standard for embedding videos and/or images into a website.

Visibility on Search Engines
Videos on vimeo are indexed by search engines but don't seem to receive special treatment on results pages.

Usage stats for resources
The number of plays, "likes" and comments about each video is available on a day-by-day basis; information on where the video is embedded is also available.

UKOER

 * MultimediaTrainingVideos

Others

 * JISC Digital Media

Notes and comments
Overall, Vimeo seems to have a higher percentage of more serious videos and users than other more popular video sharing sites. Its API seems to be simpler and better documented than YouTube's. However it is a shame that it does not have explicit support for Creative Commons, or indeed provide for any specific metadata on licensing (this is similar to YouTube).

Limits on the number of videos that may be up/down-loaded may be an issue for some OER providers:
 * A free basic account allows up to 10 files per day to be uploaded, but only a single HD video per week, and with a weekly limit of 500MB; for a paid-for vimeo plus account there is no limit on the number of files which may be uploaded but the maximum files size is 1GB with a weekly limit of 5GB in total.
 * Registration is required before one may download videos (but not for viewing or embedding).
 * Basic accounts members are limited to downloading 5 original video files in a 24-hour period. Each original video file on Vimeo can be downloaded a maximum of 100 times per day.