Staff Blog / Player Updates: AirPlay Support, Timecode Hints, and Embeddable HTML5

Hi fellow Vimeans, I have some updates to our player to talk about!

First off, we have a new feature in our HTML5 player thanks to our friends at Apple: you can now watch Vimeo videos on your AppleTV! Just play any video on your iPad or iPhone running iOS 4.3 and tap on the AirPlay button to send the video to your AppleTV.

Secondly, we've made a small improvement to our Flash player by adding a timecode hint when you mouse over the play bar. Now you should be able to jump to exact times in the video with more accuracy. We'll be adding it to the HTML5 player shortly.

Speaking of the HTML5 player, which we released about a year ago, it's now officially out of beta! Back then, there were a couple of really big limitations -- no fullscreen and it was only available on vimeo.com. Fortunately, both of those problems are now a thing of the past! Since then, Safari has added true fullscreen support in version 5 (although sadly it has not been added to Chrome yet), and we released our Universal Player. We learned a lot from the initial beta period, and we used that knowledge to completely rebuild our HTML5 player from the ground up to be faster, leaner, more compatible, and more reliable. It also means that if you opt-in to using the HTML player (under the player on any video page), it will now show up in embeds in your desktop browser too!

For now the HTML5 player is still limited to Safari and Chrome only. We are working on bringing it to IE9 and Firefox 4, but unfortunately both browsers present significant challenges at the moment. For example, IE9's HTML5 support is not yet up to snuff compared to other browsers, and Firefox video support is WebM only. We hope to support WebM in the future, but are still waiting for a number of things to improve before we can adopt it fully.

PS- For all our fellow nerds out there, here are some extra details about our HTML5 player:

• All versions of our HTML5 player (desktop, touch, mobile) now clock in at 28KB or less! (CSS and JS combined)
• We're now trying to use feature detection as much as we can, rather than user agent detection, which means the player will automatically work where it can as browsers evolve.
• We have a much more dynamic layout, meaning your videos look great no matter the size of the embed.

- Brad