I've got tons of encoders, but somehow I don't believe more encoding options will help this situation. PE9 provided the H.264 codec that Vimeo wants. The techies on Vimeo's help forum keep telling me to change this and that setting in order to make them happy. The latest was to limit the video bitrate to 5000. Well the video was playable all right, but it looked like you were looking at the clips from underwater. Now why would anyone spend all this money on the best equipment, lenses, technique and software only to have it end up looking like it was taken with a point and shoot camera from 2002?
But thanks, Cheryl, because you have now confirmed what I suspected, which is that most people are unable to play HD on Vimeo, despite all the hype about their pro level quality. I once read that not all website servers have enough bandwidth to handle high speed connection or lots of users at one time. The big ones, like YouTube, have to constantly add capacity to keep up with it all. Maybe that's what we're seeing here: Big fish eats up little fish.
Unfortunately for Vimeo, much as I like their cool interface and some of the other perks, it all boils down to what I observe after saving endless versions with different settings and then comparing the playback results to YouTube. Until the day before yesterday, I actually did not know you could control the playback resolution on either player. I suppose they tell you someplace in the small print, but I think most people are like me and don't have the time to read a manual for every last thing they use on the web. I found the HD option in Vimeo by right clicking for settings and finding a menu item to turn off HD. After that, it didn't take me long to discover that you could simply click the HD symbol as a toggle. As for YouTube: I wondered if it did the same thing and that's when I discovered that that 360p or 480p number I see on the lower right side is also a toggle switch. However, with YouTube I could pick among 5 or 6 resolutions instead of 2. Since I can successfully play the YouTube file at 720p on all of my computers (some of which are on regular high speed connection with WiFi router) I can't help but rating YouTube as the best. I now envision including a small amount of education with my YouTube link emails and tell people to click that number for the best resolution that their system can play.
Vimeo Plus has a 30 day return policy if you buy the whole year subscription. Anyone who wants to test this should give it a whirl and see for themselves.