Vimeo announced today that all its members can now upload HDR videos to the platform and sell those videos through Vimeo On Demand or with a custom subscription-based model.
The OTT service says the videos will be supported across multiple HDR displays including the iPhone X, iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K—devices for which it says it’s the only video-hosting platform available in HDR.
Vimeo will support 10-bit video and wide color gamut through Rec.2020 support. The platform will also support resolutions of up to 8K videos for Ultra High Definition displays. The company said that even members without HDR-compatible systems can still download HDR HEVC files for sharing and file transfer needs, and that anyone who receives the video file can watch it on HDR-supported devices with the QuickTime or VLC players.
And Vimeo said it will always create a separate SDR-optimized version of videos in case people try to view HDR files on an SDR screen.
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Vimeo is also promising to reduce file sizes while maintaining high image quality by beginning to use HEVC/H.265 transcodes in addition to the H.264 set. The company said it’s been cautious about rolling out new codecs.
"While new codecs continue to come out, we’re incredibly picky at Vimeo about what we use, and how we use them," wrote Sara Poorsattar, director of product management at Vimeo, in a blog post. "As leaders in quality, we want to ensure that the growing pains typically associated with new codecs—like lingering artifacts or unsightly banding—don’t impact the videos coming through our pipeline. Because of that, we’ve focused our efforts on optimizing the HEVC for Vimeo, and meticulously testing and iterating on our technology over the past year to ensure it’s crystal clear."
In the future, Vimeo plans to add HDR support for more codecs like VP9.