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Player errors and warnings

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Player errors and warnings

Overview

Various errors can be triggered when playing a media content. Those can happen when:

  • The network is unreachable
  • The codecs are not supported
  • We have no mean to decrypt the data
  • …

Some errors can be fatal to content playback in which case they will stop the player, others act more as warnings and are more along the line of a minor problem notification.

You can know if a fatal error interrupted your playback by:

  • adding an event listener to the "error" event (see the player events documentation). This event listener will take the error directly in argument.

  • calling the getError API if the current state is STOPPED. If different from null, it means that a fatal error happened (see the documentation for getError).

You can also be warned of any non-fatal error by:

  • adding an event listener to the "warning" event (see the player events documentation). The event listener will take the non-fatal error directly in argument.

All of those are in essence Error instances with added informations.

Those supplementary informations are described in this page.

Structure of an Error

Each of RxPlayer’s error objects have at least those properties:

  • type (string): A large category for the error (e.g. NETWORK_ERROR, ENCRYPTED_MEDIA_ERROR …)

  • code (string): A set identification “code” for the error encountered

  • message (string): A displayable, human-readable, summary of the error.

  • fatal (boolean): If true, the error was fatal. Meaning that the playback was interrupted by it

Types

The types are the different strings you can have as the type property of an error.

This chapter provides an exhaustive list of the possible type of error encountered.

NETWORK_ERROR

A NetworkError is any Network-related error (HTTP 404, request timeout…), they all have a type property equal to "NETWORK_ERROR".

codes

A NetworkError can only have the following code (code property):

  • "PIPELINE_LOAD_ERROR": the Manifest or segment request failed.

more informations

A NetworkError provide much more infos than this code.

Among its properties, you have:

  • url (string): The url the request has been on

  • xhr (XMLHttpRequest): The xhr associated with the request

  • status (Number): Shortcut to the status code of the xhr.

  • errorType (string): Further precision about what went wrong.

    This string can either be:

    • "TIMEOUT": The request timeouted.
    • "ERROR_EVENT": The XMLHttpRequest has sent an error event
    • "PARSE_ERROR": No data could have been extracted from this request
    • "ERROR_HTTP_CODE": The request finished with a status code not in the 2xx range.

MEDIA_ERROR

Error related to the media itself. It can both come from the player itself (Manifest parsing) or from the browser itself (content playback).

They all have a type property equal to "MEDIA_ERROR".

codes

A MediaError can have the following codes (code property):

  • "BUFFER_APPEND_ERROR": A media segment could not have been added to the corresponding SourceBuffer. This often happens with malformed segments.

  • "BUFFER_FULL_ERROR": The needed segment could not have been added because the SourceBuffer was full.

  • "BUFFER_TYPE_UNKNOWN": The type of buffer considered (e.g. “audio” / “video” / “text”) has no SourceBuffer implementation in your build.

  • "MANIFEST_INCOMPATIBLE_CODECS_ERROR": An Adaptation (or track) has none of its Representations (read quality) in a supported codec.

  • "MANIFEST_PARSE_ERROR": Generic error to signal than the Manifest could not be parsed.

  • "MANIFEST_UNSUPPORTED_ADAPTATION_TYPE": One of the Adaptation has a type (e.g. “audio”, “text” or “video” which is not managed by the RxPlayer).

  • "MEDIA_ERR_ABORTED": A crucial browser-side fetching operation was aborted.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_BLOCKED_AUTOPLAY": The current browser has a policy which forbids us to autoPlay the content. As a consequence, the rx-player stays in a "LOADED" state. This code is always a warning and it never causes playback interruption.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_PLAY_NOT_ALLOWED": A play call on our API (coming from you) failed because the current browser does not allow it. The content should still be in a paused state. This is in almost any case due a browser policy which prevents a content to play without any user interaction. In those cases, we recommend to display a UI element on your page inviting the final user to manually play the content.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_NOT_LOADED_METADATA": The current browser falsely announce having loaded the content’s metadata. In that case, we cannot switch to the LOADED state directly (we will be blocked in either a LOADING or a RELOADING state) and you’re encouraged to call play manually when you want to play the content. This is a case only encountered in the Samsung browser (as found in Android) when loading a content in “directfile” mode.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_DECODE": A pushed segment/media could not be decoded by the browser. This happens most-of-all with malformed segments.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_NETWORK": A browser-side request failed.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED": The media associated to the video element is not valid.

  • "MEDIA_ERR_UNKNOWN": Media error impossible to characterize.

  • "MEDIA_KEYS_NOT_SUPPORTED": The current browser has no MediaKeys implementation and the content is encrypted.

  • "MEDIA_SOURCE_NOT_SUPPORTED": No known MediaSource API is supported by your browser and we need to create one.

  • "MEDIA_STARTING_TIME_NOT_FOUND": The provided or calculated starting time was not found in the corresponding media.

  • "MEDIA_TIME_BEFORE_MANIFEST": The current time in the media is behind what is currently declared in the Manifest. This can lead to stalling indefinitely as the player won’t be able to download new segments arround the current time.

  • "MEDIA_TIME_AFTER_MANIFEST": The current time in the media is after what is currently declared in the Manifest. This can lead to stalling indefinitely as the player won’t be able to download new segments arround the current time.

ENCRYPTED_MEDIA_ERROR

Those errors are linked to the Encrypted Media Extensions. They concern various DRM-related problems.

They all have a type property equal to "ENCRYPTED_MEDIA_ERROR".

codes

An EncryptedMediaError can have the following codes (code property):

  • "INCOMPATIBLE_KEYSYSTEMS": None of the provided key systems was compatible with the current browser.

  • "INVALID_ENCRYPTED_EVENT": An encountered encrypted event was not valid.

  • "INVALID_KEY_SYSTEM": One of the given key system was not accepted by the RxPlayer.

  • "KEY_ERROR": The MediaKeySession emitted an error.

  • "KEY_GENERATE_REQUEST_ERROR": An error happened when calling the generateRequest API to generate a challenge.

  • "KEY_LOAD_ERROR": An error was returned by the code fetching the license.

  • "KEY_LOAD_TIMEOUT": The request for fetching the license had a duration of more than 10 seconds.

  • "KEY_STATUS_CHANGE_ERROR": An error was detected when the MediaKeySession emitted a keyStatuseschange event (e.g. the key became "expired").

  • "KEY_UPDATE_ERROR": An error was detected after a message (like a license was given to the CDM).

  • "LICENSE_SERVER_CERTIFICATE_ERROR": The server certificate of a MediaKeys could not be set.

  • "MEDIA_IS_ENCRYPTED_ERROR": The media is encrypted and no key system was given to the RxPlayer’s APIs.

OTHER_ERROR

Those errors are various other errors which does not belong to other types.

They all have a type property equal to "OTHER_ERROR".

codes

An OtherError can have the following codes (code property):

  • "PIPELINE_LOAD_ERROR": The Manifest or segment request failed and the request has been done through a given callback (i.e. not the RxPlayer’s XMLHttpRequest implementation).

  • "PIPELINE_PARSE_ERROR": The RxPlayer’s Manifest or segment parsing logic failed. This is most likely due to a malformed Manifest or segment.

  • "NONE": The error cannot be characterized.