Drama in the sky – Time Lapse from Paul Klinger on Vimeo – You can’t embed the HD Version here so you’ll have to click the HD button and go the the Vimeo site.

Vimeo offers its HD service in 720p. Sure its not 1080, but how many people can handle 1920×1080 on their home computers? I would say at this point its still the minority. So 720p does the job and is a nice jump up from the 480 stuff that we are used to.

Vimeo is using On6VP flash for video playback on its site. much like YouTube is doing. YouTube however also offers an h.264 version. (mp4 version) You can add &fmt=18 at the end of any YouTube URL and it will play you the higher quality h.264 version. (stereo audio too) This is how you are able to watch YouTube clips on many devices like the PS3. There is talk on a couple of the Vimeo forums about the possibility of moving to an h.264 format in the future especially when Flash 9 gets a full roll-out as it will natively support playback of h.264 video. The problem with this is that playing an h.264 720p streaming video over a browser on an older machine is probably not going to go well. So Flash for now is the best course.

Once you have uploaded your 720p video, Vimeo keeps the original resolution of 1280×720. During playback you can press the full screen button. Once in full screen mode, on the right there is a toggle for scaling. Which is nice because scaling up from 720p on a hi res monitor looks less than acceptable. Turning scaling off lets you watch the 720p video in its true resolution of 1280×720.

Overall… It’s a nice service. Would love to see some church’s start to stream their webcasts in 720p too.

Technorati Tags: Vimeo, 720p, H.264, YouTube, On6VP, HD