How to play a Vimeo video in VLC media player?

You are able to play Youtube videos in VLC media player by going to Media > Open Network Stream and pasting in the Youtube video URL in the "Please enter a network URL:" box and pressing Play.

For example, pasting the Youtube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-_sxP5kCk in this box, and pressing Play starts the video in VLC media player.

But if you try to paste a Vimeo URL: http://vimeo.com/11510254 in this box, then click Play, the VLC window just kind of flashes, and nothing really seems to happen, the video doesn't play.

Is there a way to play Vimeo videos in VLC media player like Youtube videos? I couldn't find anything really through my own research on this. Seems like a natural thing for VLC to support this behavior for Vimeo, since it's a pretty popular and well known video site.

I'm on Windows 7 home premium 64 bit, using VLC 2.1.3

Solution 1:

The easiest way to get the URL of the video to paste into VLC that I found was in Firefox.

Go to the video using FF. Right click -> Page Info. Go to the Media tab and find the video URL. The type will be Video, and the URL should be av.vimeo.com/foobar. Right click -> Copy the URL. Paste into VLC and off you go

Solution 2:

I have found a simpler solution than the ones put forward by @TeknoVenus for Firefox and Chrome. They didn't work for me when I tried them, which could just be that two years have made a difference in terms of how Vimeo lays out their website.

My suggestion will work for any browser. Let your mouse hover over the video so that the sharing options appear in the top right corner. Click on the 'Share' button (which looks like a paper plane). You now have two options to get the right URL:

1. Click on the 'Get embed code' button (which looks like '< />'). Copy the content it provides. Select 'Open Network Stream' in VLC. Paste the URL, but delete everything except the src field of the iframe (without quotes). It should look something like https://player.vimeo.com/video/xxxxxxxx. Press play, convert, whatever!

2. Or just copy the link address (via right-clicking, for example) from the Share view. (If you are viewing the video on the actual vimeo.com website, you can just copy the URL directly.) You should get something like https://vimeo.com/xxxxxxxx. Paste that into VLC, but add in the player. and video/ sections to get the same form as was produced in the first option.

Enjoy!

Solution 3:

Not sure how long this method will continue working but as of 12/14/2018 it works for me. I only tested with a few videos so it may not work with everything.

1. Take the url of the video you want to play https://vimeo.com/xxxxxxxx and change it to https://player.vimeo.com/video/xxxxxxxx this will be the URL of the player itself.

2. Inside the source of that page will be a line var config = {...}

3. Within the Curly Braces is JSON Data that contains the actual video URLs for the various qualitys. Look for urls ending with .mp4 and the qualites associated with them.

for example within the json data from https://player.vimeo.com/video/304859830 you can see the entry for 720p with the url associated with it

{"profile":174,"width":1280,"mime":"video/mp4","fps":23,"url":"https://fpdl.vimeocdn.com/vimeo-prod-skyfire-std-us/01/971/12/304859830/1168737254.mp4?token=1544825612-0xf1df440adf1d6f0309e948ed0a31ee471f28c5d4","cdn":"fastly","quality":"720p","id":1168737254,"origin":"gcs","height":720}

And you can just take that url and paste it straight into the stream section of VLC