Move your Vimeo library into your own pipeline

Kevin van Zonneveld

Co-founder · Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Show bio

Vimeo is a good place to host and share video. But sooner or later many teams want their videos somewhere they control: their own player, their own CDN, an archive, or a pipeline that adds captions or thumbnails. Getting the files out means writing a Vimeo API client, paging through your library, waiting for videos that are still processing, and picking the right rendition of each one.

🤖 /vimeo/import does all of that for you, and feeds the videos straight into the rest of your Assembly.

Step 1: give Transloadit read access to your videos

Vimeo only lets an app download your video files with a token that has the Video Files permission, and it hands that permission to other people’s apps only through its partner program. So you create the token yourself, in a Vimeo app of your own:

1. At developer.vimeo.com/apps⁠, create an app (or open one you have) and generate a personal access token with Public, Private and Video Files.
2. In the Transloadit Console, open Credentials, add a Vimeo credential, choose Paste a personal access token and name it, for example, vimeo.

When you save, Transloadit checks the token with Vimeo and tells you if a permission is missing. The token is never shown again. The Template Credentials docs have the details.

Step 2: one command

Save these Assembly Instructions as vimeo.json:

{
  "steps": {
    "imported": {
      "robot": "/vimeo/import",
      "credentials": "vimeo",
      "path": "me/videos",
      "rendition": "720p",
      "files_per_page": 20
    },
    "encoded_480p": {
      "use": "imported",
      "robot": "/video/encode",
      "preset": "hls/480p",
      "ffmpeg_stack": "v7"
    },
    "encoded_720p": {
      "use": "imported",
      "robot": "/video/encode",
      "preset": "hls/720p",
      "ffmpeg_stack": "v7"
    },
    "hls": {
      "use": {
        "steps": ["encoded_480p", "encoded_720p"],
        "bundle_steps": true,
        "group_by_original": true
      },
      "robot": "/video/adaptive",
      "technique": "hls",
      "playlist_name": "playlist.m3u8"
    },
    "stored": {
      "use": "hls",
      "robot": "/transloadit/store",
      "path": "vimeo/${file.original_basename}/${file.meta.relative_path}/${file.name}",
      "conflict_strategy": "overwrite",
      "result": true
    }
  }
}

Then run it:

npx -y @transloadit/node assemblies create --steps vimeo.json -o out/

Every video from your Vimeo account comes in at 720p, gets encoded at 480p and 720p, and is bundled into its own adaptive HLS stream. group_by_original keeps each video’s renditions together, so you get one playlist.m3u8 per video, named after its Vimeo ID:

$ find out/hls -name '*.m3u8'
out/hls/1243010274/playlist.m3u8
out/hls/1243010274/852x480_785191_25/852x480_785191_25.m3u8
out/hls/1243010274/1280x720_1367783_25/1280x720_1367783_25.m3u8
out/hls/1243010465/playlist.m3u8
out/hls/1243010465/852x480_769775_25/852x480_769775_25.m3u8
out/hls/1243010465/1280x720_1366589_25/1280x720_1366589_25.m3u8

The same tree lands in your Transloadit Storage under vimeo/, ready to serve. Prefer your own bucket? Swap the last Step for 🤖 /s3/store or any other storage Robot with the same path.

Make it fit your library

• Albums, channels and more: path takes any Vimeo API path, such as me/albums/:album_id/videos, me/channels/:channel_id/videos or me/likes, or an array of paths.
• Large libraries: Vimeo returns up to 100 videos per page. Set files_per_page and run once per page_number.
• Quality: rendition accepts 240p up to 1080p, or source for the original upload. Originals are only available if your Vimeo plan kept them, and not every video has every rendition. When one is missing, the Assembly says so instead of failing silently.
• Still processing: videos that Vimeo is still transcoding are waited for, not skipped.

Get started

Create the token, add the credential, and run the command above with your own account. The 🤖 /vimeo/import documentation lists every parameter.