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We were on the Vimeo business plan, which was supposedly unlimited. Until you hit a certain threshold... we run a fairly popular education site with lots of vid

We were on the Vimeo business plan, which was supposedly unlimited. Until you hit a certain threshold... we run a fairly popular education site with lots of videos and reached that cap. Our bills went up 10x or so. For our business I guess it’s still worth paying, but worth being aware that not all unlimited is really so.

lalo2302 6y ago
You can checkout mux.com. Idk about if the pricing would be cheaper or expensive. But a regular develop should be able to integrate them fair easily.
- nickjj 6y ago
  One nice feature of Vimeo is you can prevent a video from being accessible (streamed, embedded, etc.) on anything but a list of domains of your choosing. Mux doesn't have this feature (yet). The best you could do is sign every video and have it expire after X time. This can get quite complicated and is less secure since it's only restricted by time (IP address isn't an option either), but due to the nature of how it works, you need to make the video accessible for a bit longer than the duration of it. If Mux were to add domain restricted security features, I think I would switch to them because having the option of using a custom player is nice for niche content.
  - gingerlime 6y ago
    Mux and cloudflare stream are on my list of potential alternatives. We do use this domain restriction of Vimeo. It’s not fullproof but definitely stops casual downloads.
    - nickjj 6y ago
      What can you do to bypass their domain restrictions, besides things like recording your screen during playback and distributing a separate video.
      - gingerlime 6y ago
        I haven't tried it, but I think youtube-dl can bypass it https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/10541 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/10541 Our own videos have been pirated already and are shared around some torrents sites and on telegram, and there's nothing we can do besides plead to people's sense of moral duty. We're not a huge Hollywood studio or a megacorp. We're just a small bootstrapped company and producing our videos is the most expensive and time-consuming part of our platform. Luckily we still offer some added value besides videos, and make it easy to "do the right thing" and pay a subscription. Yet, we just have to live with piracy I guess. Vimeo didn't prevent it, although perhaps made it only slightly harder.
        nickjj 6y ago
        Hmm. It looks like the "hack" is to only set the referrer header of the request to be the domain that's whitelisted which can be done with any HTTP client, but the issue is also 4 years old. I wonder if that's been addressed because the referrer header is really not something you can trust from the client. I wonder if this also means if you use browser extensions that focus on security (such as randomizing your user agent and deleting the referrer header) that those folks wouldn't be able to even watch the videos. Thanks for bringing this to my attention because if domain restriction does indeed still work like this then I don't think I will use Vimeo for that feature alone. Signed URLs with both time and IP address based restrictions would be ideal. I wonder if IP address based restrictions is something Mux has planned.
        gingerlime 6y ago
        Yes, we come across some people with privacy browser extensions that remove the referrer and indeed this is causing playback issues for them. It's still a fairly effective protection for casual copying or link sharing, but of course it's easy to circumvent. Even DRM gets broken all the time, so it seems like a bit of a futile effort to try to prevent it completely.
  - poxrud 6y ago
    I played around with mux and it was a pleasure to use. However I needed to implement a PPV type experience and unfortunately mux did not have any way to restrict or revoke access to content on a per viewer basis. One of my requirements was to be able to revoke tokens for streams that got shared and detect multiple viewers under the same token but sadly this capability was missing. As for pricing mux is priced very well and cheaper than AWS and many other platforms.

lalo2302 6y ago

You can checkout mux.com. Idk about if the pricing would be cheaper or expensive. But a regular develop should be able to integrate them fair easily.

nickjj 6y ago
One nice feature of Vimeo is you can prevent a video from being accessible (streamed, embedded, etc.) on anything but a list of domains of your choosing. Mux doesn't have this feature (yet). The best you could do is sign every video and have it expire after X time. This can get quite complicated and is less secure since it's only restricted by time (IP address isn't an option either), but due to the nature of how it works, you need to make the video accessible for a bit longer than the duration of it. If Mux were to add domain restricted security features, I think I would switch to them because having the option of using a custom player is nice for niche content.
- gingerlime 6y ago
  Mux and cloudflare stream are on my list of potential alternatives. We do use this domain restriction of Vimeo. It’s not fullproof but definitely stops casual downloads.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    What can you do to bypass their domain restrictions, besides things like recording your screen during playback and distributing a separate video.
    - gingerlime 6y ago
      I haven't tried it, but I think youtube-dl can bypass it https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/10541 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/10541 Our own videos have been pirated already and are shared around some torrents sites and on telegram, and there's nothing we can do besides plead to people's sense of moral duty. We're not a huge Hollywood studio or a megacorp. We're just a small bootstrapped company and producing our videos is the most expensive and time-consuming part of our platform. Luckily we still offer some added value besides videos, and make it easy to "do the right thing" and pay a subscription. Yet, we just have to live with piracy I guess. Vimeo didn't prevent it, although perhaps made it only slightly harder.
      - nickjj 6y ago
        Hmm. It looks like the "hack" is to only set the referrer header of the request to be the domain that's whitelisted which can be done with any HTTP client, but the issue is also 4 years old. I wonder if that's been addressed because the referrer header is really not something you can trust from the client. I wonder if this also means if you use browser extensions that focus on security (such as randomizing your user agent and deleting the referrer header) that those folks wouldn't be able to even watch the videos. Thanks for bringing this to my attention because if domain restriction does indeed still work like this then I don't think I will use Vimeo for that feature alone. Signed URLs with both time and IP address based restrictions would be ideal. I wonder if IP address based restrictions is something Mux has planned.
        gingerlime 6y ago
        Yes, we come across some people with privacy browser extensions that remove the referrer and indeed this is causing playback issues for them. It's still a fairly effective protection for casual copying or link sharing, but of course it's easy to circumvent. Even DRM gets broken all the time, so it seems like a bit of a futile effort to try to prevent it completely.
- poxrud 6y ago
  I played around with mux and it was a pleasure to use. However I needed to implement a PPV type experience and unfortunately mux did not have any way to restrict or revoke access to content on a per viewer basis. One of my requirements was to be able to revoke tokens for streams that got shared and detect multiple viewers under the same token but sadly this capability was missing. As for pricing mux is priced very well and cheaper than AWS and many other platforms.