Playback Troubleshooting

Congratulations, a video isn’t playing and we’re going to troubleshoot. If you’re just troubleshooting video playback as a beginner we’ve got a handy set of walkthrough steps to take. If this isn’t your first rodeo, refer to the handy checklist below to make sure you haven’t missed a step.

Walkthrough

Great, you’ve selected the walkthrough option. We’re excited to help you walk through this.

Communicate!

Nobody likes it when a video isn’t playing, it kinda sucks. It’s good to start your email out letting the customer know that it’s all going to be okay, we’re on it, and it’s likely (but not always the case) that it’s a localized issue that’s not affecting the majority of the people they want seeing the video. Here’s a good sample of something to tell the customer:

I’ve gone ahead and run a few tests to checkout what’s going on with your video. Currently, it’s playing back without any trouble in those tests, which is a good sign. Hopefully, that means it’s a localized issue that we can narrow down with a few more questions and tests:

But wait, mysterious Playback Guide author(s)! I’m not able to play that video so your nifty sample opener doesn’t apply to me, and I’m special… Don’t worry, good champ, we’ve got you:

I’ve gone ahead and taken a look at your video and I’m seeing issues as well. It looks like the problem might be related to [HEY CHAMP INSERT THE PROBLEM HERE]. We’re fixing it by [IT’S ME AGAIN, INSERT THE ANSWER HERE]. That should solve the problem, but if the video is still not playing properly after clearing the cache, please let us know and we’d be happy to look further into it.

Great, you’re half way there! Now that you have a good opening paragraph, you can take a moment to relax as well. Remember what we said two paragraphs ago? Nobody likes playback issues, including us, but we’re on the road to getting it solved.

What questions and tests to run?

So what about those tests to see where the playback issue is localized to? These are the first steps in our Playback - Saved Reply, because they’re great troubleshooting steps to kick things off.

In general, one of the first things we suggest is clearing the browser cache and resetting the router (it’s a preliminary step we like to rule out immediately). We also recommend restarting your browser, and confirming that it’s up to date: https://whatbrowser.org/

Does the problem persist in multiple browsers? Please send the link that http://www.whatsmybrowser.org/ generates for you (this gives us additional information that helps us test things in a similar environment).

Similar to the above, I’d also recommend testing in different devices or networks. This can be helpful in seeing how widespread or narrow the problem is.

That will give us a baseline for where to focus our next tests. You can even tell the customer that because it’s great to be transparent about what we’re doing for a lot of things. They can let us know and we’ll have a better idea of what might be causing the problem.

Narrowing Down the Issue

So, they wrote back with more information…now what? This is a good point to really keep track of what we do and don’t know. You can take notes on what we know, but we’re going to diverge down the many fold path of the ever perilous playback troubles forest.

The next step is to take the information we got back and decide what path to check out.

A Quick Backstory

Before picking a path let’s take a detour to overview how video playback works in the Wistia player. A bit of background knowledge and facts can help choose the right place to look next.

Playing a video in the Wistia player needs a few things to happen to work.

First, a javascript library is loaded onto the page that will “oversee” playback. This is the E-v1.js script. If you’re seeing a Wistia video player and it “looks” like a vanilla Wistia player then it’s safe to assume that E-v1 is running somewhere behind the scenes… since E-v1.js is what constructs the actual html and styles of that video player to make it look like a Wistia player.

Second, when a viewer clicks play, our video player sends requests for segments of a video file that are served from a content delivery network. A content delivery network is a coordinated bunch of web servers (100s of them) in different places around the world that have pieces of the video file on them and “serve” them back to the video player over the internet. The video player will request further chunks of the file as the video plays back.

This process can be “broken” in some common ways. If the video player tries to request the video file from a server, but the network has settings in a firewall or proxy that does not allow those requests, the player cannot get the file to playback. We’d expect to see the problem on that specific network but not others. Browsers have different idiosyncrasies with how javascript code runs in them, especially older versions of browsers. Sometimes a browser understands our code in a way that causes an error with playback or our code is written differently for different browser environments, so we’ll see a problem in one specific browser. Similarly, a single website can have code that accidentally interferes with the Wistia player code to cause a playback error. In that case we’d expect to see playback work on any normal website, but not on the website with the strange code. These are just a few examples, but playback has a lot of edge cases! Given where the problem appears and where it doesn’t, we can take our best guess at what the issue might be and what further information to gather. But first, and finally, make sure you cleared that cache.

Common Second Steps

Down the forest path we go!

  • iOs/Phone
  • Google/Firefox/InternetExplorer
  • It’s only on their website
  • It’s actually encoding
  • It’s the network

Checklist

  • Can you play the video?
  • Have they cleared the cache?
  • Is the problem specific to certain browsers? Or operating systems?

  • Is the problem specific to a certain network?

  • Frequency of the issue. All of the time, or some of the time? Along those lines if “some of the time” are there any commonalities?
  • What exactly is the “non-playback” like i.e. stuttering, stuck, black screen, etc?
  • Is the problem for this Wistia video or all their Wistia videos?

  • Is the problem both on their website and on the Wistia media page?

  • Are there any errors in the developer tools console?
  • What does tech squad think?
  • Does setting ?whls=false allow the video to play?
  • Problem report and network requests for the video files