Once SmartVideo is installed on your site and Vimeo auto-conversion is enabled (see “How do I turn automatic conversions on?” below), SmartVideo begins scanning for Vimeo videos. 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.
How do I turn automatic conversions on?
Automatic Vimeo conversions can be enabled in your installation. If you have downloaded our SmartVideo plugin for WordPress, turn the feature on by visiting the Settings tab and checking Auto-convert YouTube & Vimeo videos (as shown below).
If the box is not checked, simply check it and click Save Settings.
If you have pasted our SmartVideo snippet into your site’s header using one of our other installation methods, just make sure the snippet includes:
autoreplace: {
vimeo: true
}If it doesn’t, we recommend using our configuration tool to regenerate the script properly.
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 quickest confirmation there is. How do I know SmartVideo is working? walks through that check, plus the views count in your dashboard and the devtools check.
On timing. A single video takes roughly 2-3x its own length to process — so a 10-minute video is usually ready in 20 to 30 minutes. Videos convert individually rather than as one batch, so a whole library spreads out over hours, and a very large one over days. 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?
Auto-conversion from YouTube was previously supported but has been retired — YouTube’s ongoing download restrictions made the import method unreliable. We’re exploring an importer-style replacement inside the SmartVideo library that would let you pull a YouTube URL into your own SmartVideo storage on demand, but we don’t have a timeline to share.
In the meantime: 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 made auto-conv valuable: a clean player with no overlays or recommended videos pulling viewers away, 12x faster playback with 8x less buffering than YouTube, and traffic that stays on your site instead of leaking back to YouTube.
Read more about how auto Vimeo conversion works.