Once SmartVideo is installed on your site, it scans for Vimeo videos: Vimeo auto-conversion is on by default (see “Where to check the setting” below). Any videos found will be displayed in our clean, fast-loading SmartVideo player automatically, requiring no extra work on your part.
When a page with a video loads for the first time, it tells SmartVideo to fetch that video, encode it, and store it on our network. From then on, the video is hosted on our global delivery network and served via our accelerated playback technology.
Where to check the setting
Automatic Vimeo conversions are on by default. In our SmartVideo plugin for WordPress, open the Settings tab and find Auto-conversions: Replace YouTube & Vimeo embeds stays on unless you turn it off, and the setting saves automatically. Older plugin versions called it Auto-convert YouTube & Vimeo videos.
If you have pasted our SmartVideo snippet into your site’s header using one of our other installation methods, Replace YouTube & Vimeo embeds is on by default in the Configuration tab of your Swarmify dashboard, and the snippet it generates includes:
autoreplace: {
youtube: true,
vimeo: true
}If your snippet doesn’t include this, regenerate it from the Configuration tab. Turning the setting off there stops both YouTube and Vimeo embed replacement.
SmartVideo imports Vimeo videos whose Who can watch setting is Anyone. To keep those videos private to your own site while SmartVideo serves them, set Where can this be embedded to Specific domains and list your website’s domain. Password-protected and Only me videos stay on Vimeo; change the setting to convert them.
How do I kick conversions off?
Loading the page is all it takes. Once the snippet is in place and Vimeo auto-conversion is on, opening a page that carries a Vimeo embed tells SmartVideo to fetch that video, encode it, and store it on our network. You don’t need to keep the page open, reload it, or do anything per video.
Two things worth knowing if you’re moving a whole library over:
- Every page carrying an embed needs to be loaded once, with the snippet in place. A video that only appears on a page nobody has opened yet hasn’t been queued yet.
- That includes pages behind a login. Course pages, member areas, and unlinked pages all count — if you want those videos converted, open each of those pages yourself once while logged in.
How do I see how far along my conversions are?
There isn’t a progress page for auto-conversions today. Here’s what you can check instead.
Your Library list won’t show them. The Video Library in your dashboard and the Imported Videos list at files.swarmify.com/videos are the same list, and it holds only the videos you added yourself — either by uploading a file or by importing one from a source URL. Auto-converted videos never become Library entries: they’re fetched from the embeds already on your pages and served right where those embeds live, so there’s nothing for that list to show. An empty Library on a site that’s actively converting is expected, not a sign something went wrong. (More on the difference between the two paths in Migrating from Vimeo to SmartVideo.)
Watch the player instead. Conversion happens per video, so your pages move from Vimeo to SmartVideo gradually rather than all at once. Reload a page with converted videos on it and you’ll see the SmartVideo player in place of the Vimeo embed. The WordPress plugin’s Legacy player (the default in plugin 2.4) shows the SmartVideo player right away, so on WordPress, confirm conversion with the devtools check. How do I know SmartVideo is working? walks through each check.
On timing. A video usually converts in about as long as it runs, so a 10-minute video takes about 10 minutes. Each video starts converting the first time a page with its embed loads, so your library moves to SmartVideo as visitors reach your pages. Videos that haven’t converted yet keep playing from Vimeo in the meantime, so nothing on your site breaks while you wait.
Want a count? Email us at support@swarmify.com and we can tell you how many of your videos have finished encoding and how much storage they’re taking up so far. It’s the most precise answer available right now, and we’re happy to check.
What about YouTube?
YouTube conversion is best-effort — YouTube’s download restrictions mean the fetch can fail, so some videos convert and some don’t. For playback you can rely on, download the file and upload it to your SmartVideo library.
How that works: download the YouTube video to your computer, then upload it to SmartVideo storage through your SmartVideo library or our WordPress plugin. Once it’s in SmartVideo, you get all the player benefits (clean UI, fast playback, no YouTube branding) without depending on YouTube as a source. Even by hand, moving a YouTube video into SmartVideo storage delivers what makes auto-conversion valuable: a clean player with no third-party overlays or recommended videos pulling viewers away, CDN-delivered playback with adaptive bitrate instead of a heavy embed iframe, and traffic that stays on your site instead of leaking back to YouTube.
Read more about how auto Vimeo conversion works.