You fixed something in a video, uploaded the corrected file over the old one on Vimeo (or Bunny, S3, Dropbox, your Media Library — same story anywhere), and your site is still showing the version you replaced. Nothing is broken, and here’s why it happens.
Why the old version keeps playing
SmartVideo treats the source URL as the identity of the video. The first time we see a link, we download it, encode our optimized versions, and from then on we serve our own copies from our CDN — we don’t go back and re-read your source. So when a host lets you swap the file behind an unchanged link, that link still looks to us like a video we already have, and the copy we encoded the first time keeps serving.
This is the same mechanism that makes SmartVideo resilient: once a video is processed, moving or deleting the original doesn’t stop playback. The trade-off is that a silent replacement at the same URL doesn’t reach us on its own.
The fix: send us the list
Email support@swarmify.com with the source links for the videos you replaced — the Vimeo/S3/Bunny/Dropbox links, one per line, or a text file attachment if it’s a long list. That’s all we need. You don’t need to find the matching SmartVideo player, and you definitely don’t need to scrape anything off pages behind a login: we look the videos up by the source link.
We clear our stored copy for each one. The next time someone loads the page, your corrected video is imported and encoded fresh, exactly as if it were new — so give it the usual processing window of roughly 2-3x the length of the video.
Give the edge up to 7 days
Our CDN edge servers can keep a cached copy of a file for up to 7 days after we clear our stored copy. So even once everything is done on our side, a video that’s already popular in a particular region may keep showing the old version to some viewers for a few days while that cached copy ages out. If something is still stubbornly old after a week, send us that shortlist and we’ll take another look.
Doing it yourself, without a support ticket
If you’d rather not wait on us, publish the corrected file at a new URL — a new upload, a new filename, or a fresh share link — and update the link in your page or SmartVideo tag. A URL we’ve never seen is imported from scratch automatically, and because it’s a brand-new video to us, there’s no old cached copy anywhere to wait out. This is also how you change the poster image on a Vimeo-sourced video (see How to change the poster/thumbnail for a YouTube or Vimeo video).
For a direct source, the tag stays exactly as it always is — just pointed at the new file:
<smartvideo src="https://your-video.example.com/file.mp4" width="1280" height="720" class="swarm-fluid" controls></smartvideo>While you’re at it
Keep your master files somewhere you control. SmartVideo stores a delivery-ready encode, not a byte-for-byte copy of your original, so your own storage is what you re-edit and re-upload from. See Video backup best practices.
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