Switching from Vimeo to SmartVideo doesn’t require re-uploading all your videos at once. There are two paths depending on how much control you want.
Option 1: Auto-conversion (easiest)
This is the simplest migration path — no embed code changes required. Enable Vimeo auto-conversion and SmartVideo handles the rest automatically as visitors load your pages. See Automatic Vimeo conversions for the full enable steps and how it works under the hood.
Option 2: SmartVideo tag (best performance)
For the fastest page load times, replace your Vimeo embeds with SmartVideo tags. This avoids loading Vimeo’s JavaScript entirely once the video has been converted.
Replace this:
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/123456789" ...></iframe>With this:
<smartvideo src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/123456789"
width="1280" height="720"
class="swarm-fluid" controls>
</smartvideo>SmartVideo will import the video from Vimeo on first load, then serve it from the SmartVideo CDN going forward.
Vimeo privacy settings
Your Vimeo videos need to be accessible for SmartVideo to import them. These privacy settings work:
- Anyone - works
- Anyone with the link - works
- People with the password - works
The “Only me” setting will block SmartVideo from accessing the video.
How to verify the migration is working
You’ll know a video has been converted when it plays in the SmartVideo player — look for its floating rounded control bar in place of your original embed. For more ways to confirm it’s working, see How do I know SmartVideo is working?.
What to expect during the transition
- Processing time depends on the video length and resolution, but most videos are ready within minutes
- All videos continue playing normally during processing - there’s no downtime
- You can track which videos have been optimized in your SmartVideo Dashboard
Things to keep in mind
Chapters: SmartVideo does not currently support Vimeo’s chapter markers. If your videos rely on chapters for navigation, that feature won’t carry over.
Analytics: SmartVideo doesn’t replicate Vimeo’s heatmap-style engagement analytics. SmartVideo does track views and integrates with Google Analytics for video events (play, pause, progress milestones), which covers the most common tracking needs.
Captions: If your Vimeo videos have captions, SmartVideo can import them automatically if the caption setting is enabled before the video is first processed. See our captions guide for details.
Canceling Vimeo
Once all your videos show as optimized in the SmartVideo Dashboard and you’ve confirmed playback is working on your key pages, you can cancel your Vimeo subscription if you’d like. All streaming at that point is handled entirely by SmartVideo.
There’s no rush on this - both services can run side by side for as long as you need.
Thinking through the move? See the Vimeo migration overview.
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