Attached is the trailer for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, first from YouTube and the second from Vimeo.

With YouTube’s Flash player, you can jump ahead before the video is fully loaded. Vimeo? You cannot.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Another plus for the YouTube player: once the video is fully loaded, it stays cached. Vimeo’s does not.

Oh, and I’m sure there are some people who have fancy Pipes being able to download this so fast that my little experiment fails. I hate/love you.

Why This Is Ridiculously Annoying

These are 1 minute long videos, so it’s not that big of a deal to not be able to jump around. (And who’d want to, these trailers are still awesome.)

But think how annoying it would be for an hour long screencast, interview, or presentation. If I find a lengthy piece of video on Vimeo, I try to find it somewhere else online.

Let’s assume that Flash crashed. (I know, hard to believe.) This forces me to restart the download from the beginning and makes me wait until the stream catches up to where I left off. YouTube? Just jump to where you left off. (It would be cool if it somehow saved where I left off, like Hulu in some cases.)

Also, this is mildly annoying if I’m going up to HD or dropping down to lower quality, since the video has to restart downloading. YouTube handles this a lot more gracefully by upscaling or downscaling and continuing from when you left off.

Skipping Ahead

Please don’t take this the wrong way: Vimeo is a fine video sharing site. I’ve heard great things about the upload process from other developers using Vimeo for the aforementioned uses, and I like the design of their site.

But, come on. There was a time when jumping around a video was a whiz-bang futuristic feature. These days, Vimeo is the exception for not having this feature.

What surprises me is that I can scrub the video, meaning: I can click and hold on the progress bar (Vimeo: What progress bar?), and you’ll see the keyframes of the video. I don’t know much about Flash in general, but I feel like this feature is doable without too much reprocessing of old videos. I’d like to hear from Vimeo on this.

Bonus Rant

I absolutely abhor when I click on the video playing in the YouTube’s Flash player that it opens up to the YouTube page. I mildly dislike that Vimeo’s player doesn’t do anything, except I do like how double clicking the video makes it go into full screen.

I’m sure there’s a blog post somewhere out there, calling out for standard User Interfaces for flash players in general. Maybe native players will win? HTML5 <video> FTW?