This has been asked before but there is no definitive or clear answer, so I'm asking again.
I would like to embed vimeo videos on my own website, and enable playing those videos only to specific subscribed users only.
Is it possible to control the access? In a way of requesting a session token for a specific 'video play' and initialize the player with that token?
Looking through the developer docs, OAuth authentication and access tokens are mostly in relation with performing actions on the vimeo accout (upload, list, etc).
Does the vimeo player integration support API access control?
No.
The Vimeo API can only toggle a video's privacy settings, the API cannot grant playback to users outside of the privacy settings provided by Vimeo.
For example, the API can be used to set a video as password-protected and to set the video's password, however the API cannot be used to authenticate and bypass password protection and allow playback.
The privacy settings valid for a video's privacy.view and privacy.embed preferences are documented here: https://developer.vimeo.com/api/reference/videos#edit_video
An overview of video privacy settings on Vimeo can be found here: https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224817847-Privacy-settings-overview