How to play a Vimeo video in VLC media player?

The easiest way to get the URL of the video to paste into VLC that I found was in Firefox.

Go to the video using FF. Right click -> Page Info. Go to the Media tab and find the video URL. The type will be Video, and the URL should be av.vimeo.com/foobar. Right click -> Copy the URL. Paste into VLC and off you go

Page Info Window


I have found a simpler solution than the ones put forward by @TeknoVenus for Firefox and Chrome. They didn't work for me when I tried them, which could just be that two years have made a difference in terms of how Vimeo lays out their website.

My suggestion will work for any browser. Let your mouse hover over the video so that the sharing options appear in the top right corner. Click on the 'Share' button (which looks like a paper plane). You now have two options to get the right URL:

  1. Click on the 'Get embed code' button (which looks like '< />'). Copy the content it provides. Select 'Open Network Stream' in VLC. Paste the URL, but delete everything except the src field of the iframe (without quotes). It should look something like https://player.vimeo.com/video/xxxxxxxx. Press play, convert, whatever!

  2. Or just copy the link address (via right-clicking, for example) from the Share view. (If you are viewing the video on the actual vimeo.com website, you can just copy the URL directly.) You should get something like https://vimeo.com/xxxxxxxx. Paste that into VLC, but add in the player. and video/ sections to get the same form as was produced in the first option.

Enjoy!