Troubleshooting Player Issues

Troubleshooting Device Playback Issues

This guide walks through our debugging process for player issues. In order to identify the cause of any playback issues you’re having, we ask that you walk through the following debug steps to provide log information to our development team. This will help our team identify and try to reproduce the issue.

Testing from the Browser

Testing from a browser makes things easier to test and if you can reproduce the issue there, then it will be a quicker resolution. If the browser does not exhibit the problem, it will help us narrow the issue down to something to do with devices. Here’s how:

Go to https://player.telemetrytv.com on Chrome and pair the device to your account. You’ll then run your test with that browser, where you can take the Internet offline, etc.
If you are an Enterprise Customer with QA Access, we ask that you also perform this on QA using https://qa-player.telemetrytv.com and pairing to your QA environment.

Enable Debug Mode

In order to view detailed log information, we first need to enable debug mode.

Select the test device on your device list.
In Settings tab > Log Level, set to Debug
Click the Toggle Debug Mode icon in the top right to toggle debug on the browser test player.

Open the console

Go back to your tab with the test player open. Now, we need to open the console to look for any error messages.

You can open the console (ctrl-shift-i or right click + inspect) and see what is going on. Of interest is the messages in the console.
In the top section, select Application, then on the left expand Cache > Cache Storage > select videos.
In the lower section, select Console to view console logs at the same time.

This is what your browser should look like (debug mode enabled on player, Application info in the top, console logs in the bottom). The Console may also open as a separate tab, depending on your screen size.

Videos shows the videos that have been cached on the device (and will be available for offline playback).
In debug mode, there will be a listing of the messages that are being logged on the device. Seeing this list of messages is crucial to understanding what’s going on.

Now, run the playlist with these items open. Once you can reproduce the issue on the browser, send a full screenshot of what it says in the debug logs and the console logs. This should identify what errors are occurring when the issue appears.

Device Cache Logs & Cache Miss Rate

For video caching issues, we also ask that you look into your device logs and cache miss rate to identify how the device is handling caching.

In the Logs

With debug logs set, you can select the “Logs” tab on the devices page and use the search bar to search for cache.

You’ll see hits and misses. You want cache hits, as this means the video is in the cache. A miss means that the player needs to go out to the network to get the file, which should only happen once for a video.

Cache Miss Rate

Under the “Info” tab you’ll see the cache miss rate, which indicates the percentage of requests that were misses. This should ideally be as close to zero as possible, so it’s important to keep an eye on it.