I feel obligated to tell the world about this problem after spending hours trying to figure out how to fix it.
It would appear that Quicktime saves Vimeo movies in a peculiar way resulting in a “time value error.” This became particularly clear to me when attempting to import a Vimeo-downloaded movie into Digital Performer — the audio wouldn’t copy to a track; it instead gave me the error “Invalid Time result code= -2015”
Not surprisingly, I learned from this list of Mac errors, that error -2015 is an invalid time error.
After a bit of sleuthing, I came across this ClickToFlash Lighthouse ticket which suggests two work-arounds:
“1. Opening the file in VLC, exporting it as MPEG4 without transcoding gives a file that’s fine for QuickTime.
2. Trimming the film a tiny bit at the very beginning in QuickTime Player seems to resolve the problem as well.”
I tried VLC, but, for some reason, I still couldn’t get it to work, so I wound up trimming a few frames off of the beginning and it’s working perfectly.
The step by step, for the step-by-step needers:
1. Download the Vimeo Movie using the link on the right-bottom of the video’s page (right click if necessary).
2. Open it in Quicktime [Pro or, like, non-Pro — it doesn’t matter].
3. Select Edit -> Trim or Apple+T
4. Use the slider on the left to adjust the beginning of the movie.
5. Save
Bam!
The more you know!