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, replace your Vimeo embeds with SmartVideo tags. You can do this today — it’s the setup we’d point you to if you’re comfortable editing your own templates.
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>Use the embed form of the Vimeo URL (https://player.vimeo.com/video/123456789). A plain https://vimeo.com/123456789 page URL works too — SmartVideo rewrites it to the embed form for you — but that rewrite only handles that exact shape. A www.vimeo.com/... link, or an unlisted link with an extra code in the path (vimeo.com/123456789/abc123), won’t be rewritten, so convert those to the embed form yourself. See Basic SmartVideo tag options for the full list of attributes you can add.
Wait — why is the Vimeo URL still in there?
It’s only an identifier. We hash that URL to work out where your video lives on our CDN, so once the video has converted, playback comes entirely from us — nothing is fetched from Vimeo, and Vimeo’s iframe and player JavaScript never load. (A video that hasn’t converted yet is the one exception, and it’s a temporary one — see “You don’t have to wait for conversions to finish” below.)
What this actually saves you
With auto-conversion, our head script finds the third-party embeds on your page and swaps them out at load time. When you use the SmartVideo tag directly, there’s nothing to swap — the player is built straight from your own markup.
Keep the SmartVideo snippet in your <head>. It’s what builds the player, so it’s still required. What goes away is the scan-and-replace pass over your Vimeo embeds, not the script itself.
Once the last embed is swapped, you can turn the Vimeo scan off. In your swarmoptions, set autoreplace: { vimeo: false } — the script then stops looking for Vimeo iframes entirely and only picks up your <smartvideo> tags (that’s autoreplace.smartvideotag, which is on by default). Leave vimeo: true while you still have embeds waiting to be swapped, or those pages stop being converted. See Configure SmartVideo with swarmoptions for where these options go.
You don’t have to wait for conversions to finish
You can swap every embed on your site today, even if most of your library hasn’t converted yet. If a video hasn’t been converted, the tag still queues it for conversion and falls back to playing from Vimeo in the meantime — so nothing breaks mid-migration, and each video quietly switches over to the SmartVideo player as it finishes.
That means the order doesn’t matter: swap the embeds whenever it’s convenient, and let conversions catch up behind you.
Going further
If you’re comfortable in the code, Configure a single video with data-swarm-setup covers per-video overrides, and Configure SmartVideo with swarmoptions covers the site-wide settings beyond autoreplace.
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 — roughly 2-3x the video’s own length
- All videos continue playing normally during processing - there’s no downtime
- To check on a specific video, reload the page it’s on: once it’s converted, you’ll see the SmartVideo player with its floating rounded control bar in place of the Vimeo embed. How do I know SmartVideo is working? covers the other ways to confirm, and you can always email support@swarmify.com for a count of how many of your videos have finished encoding.
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 you’ve confirmed playback is working on your key pages — and, if you want the precise number, emailed us for a count of how many of your videos have finished encoding — 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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