Monitor THEOplayer (Web)

Features

The following data can be collected by the Mux Data SDK when you use the THEOplayer Web SDK, as described below.

Supported Features:

• Engagement metrics
• Quality of Experience Metrics
• Web metrics such as Player Startup Time, Page Load Time, etc
• Available for deployment from a package manager
• Average Bitrate metrics and renditionchange events
• Customizable Error Tracking
• Ads metrics
• Custom Beacon Domain
• Extraction of HLS Session Data
• Live Stream Latency metric

1Install @mux/mux-data-theoplayer

Include the Mux JavaScript SDK on every page of your web app that includes video.

npm install --save @mux/mux-data-theoplayer

2Initialize Mux Data

Get your ENV_KEY from the Mux environments dashboard.

Call new THEOplayer.Player like you normally would. Call initTHEOplayerMux with a reference to the player instance and the Mux SDK options.

import * as THEOplayer from 'theoplayer';
import initTHEOplayerMux from '@mux/mux-data-theoplayer';

const playerInitTime = initTHEOplayerMux.utils.now();
const playerWrapper = document.querySelector('#my-player');

// Get a reference to your player, and pass it to the init function
const player = new THEOplayer.Player(playerWrapper, {
  // Insert player configuration here
});

player.src = 'https://muxed.s3.amazonaws.com/leds.mp4';

initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: 'ENV_KEY', // required
    // Metadata
    player_name: '', // ex: 'My Main Player'
    player_init_time: playerInitTime // ex: 1451606400000
    // ... and other metadata
  }
}, THEOplayer);

Passing in THEOplayer global

You'll see the 3rd argument to initTHEOplayerMux is THEOplayer. This is the global THEOplayer object. If you are using a bundler and importing THEOplayer with require or import then you'll need to pass in the THEOplayer object.

If no THEOplayer object is passed in, then initTHEOplayerMux will look for THEOplayer on then global window object.

3Make your data actionable

The only required field in the options that you pass into initTHEOplayerMux is env_key. But without some metadata the metrics in your dashboard will lack the necessary information to take meaningful actions. Metadata allows you to search and filter on important fields in order to diagnose issues and optimize the playback experience for your end users.

Pass in metadata under the data on initialization.

// player here is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: 'ENV_KEY', // required
    // Site Metadata
    viewer_user_id: '', // ex: '12345'
    experiment_name: '', // ex: 'player_test_A'
    sub_property_id: '', // ex: 'cus-1'
    // Player Metadata
    player_name: '', // ex: 'My Main Player'
    player_version: '', // ex: '1.0.0'
    player_init_time: '', // ex: 1451606400000
    // Video Metadata
    video_id: '', // ex: 'abcd123'
    video_title: '', // ex: 'My Great Video'
    video_series: '', // ex: 'Weekly Great Videos'
    video_duration: '', // in milliseconds, ex: 120000
    video_stream_type: '', // 'live' or 'on-demand'
    video_cdn: '' // ex: 'Fastly', 'Akamai'
  }
});

For more information, view Make your data actionable.

4Set or update metadata after initialization

There are some cases where you may not have the full set of metadata until after the video playback has started. In this case, you should omit the values when you first call initTHEOplayerMux. Then, once you have the metadata, you can update the metadata with the updateData method.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
let monitor = initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: 'ENV_KEY', // required

    video_id: 'abcd123',
  }
});

monitor.updateData({ video_title: 'My Updated Great Video' });

5Changing the video

There are two cases where the underlying tracking of the video view need to be reset:

1. New source: When you load a new source URL into an existing player.
2. New program: When the program within a singular stream changes (such as a program change within a continuous live stream).

Note: You do not need to change the video info when changing to a different source of the same video content (e.g. different resolution or video format).

New source

For THEOplayer, you do not need to emit the videochange event when the player source property of the player is updated. The sourcechange event that is fired when you update the source property of the player is handled automatically. However, you still need to pass the updated video metadata under metadata.mux, as shown in the example below.

When this is done, it removes all previous video data and resets all metrics for the video view. Note: the previous method using changeMuxVideo has been deprecated, but will continue to work for 2.x versions of this plugin.

player.source = {
  sources: {
    // ...your source
  },
  metadata: {
    mux: {
      video_id: 'new-ID',
      video_title: 'New title',
      // ... other metadata
    }
  }
}

New program

In some cases, you may have the program change within a stream, and you may want to track each program as a view on its own. An example of this is a live stream that streams multiple programs back to back, with no interruptions.

In this case, you emit a programchange event, including the updated metadata for the new program within the continuous stream. This will remove all previous video data and reset all metrics for the video view, creating a new video view. See Metadata for the list of video details you can provide. You can include any metadata when changing the video but you should only need to update the values that start with video.

Note: The programchange event is intended to be used only while the player is currently not paused. If you emit this event while the player is paused, the resulting view will not track video startup time correctly, and may also have incorrect watch time. Do not emit this event while the player is paused.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
let monitor = initTHEOPlayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

// emit `programchange` when the content within the stream changes
monitor.emit('programchange', {
  video_id: 'abc345',
  video_title: 'My Other Great Video',
  video_series: 'Weekly Great Videos',
  // ...
});

6Advanced options

Disable cookies

By default, Mux plugins for HTML5-based players use a cookie to track playback across subsequent page views in order to understand viewing sessions. This cookie includes information about the tracking of the viewer, such as an anonymized viewer ID that Mux generates for each user. None of this information is personally-identifiable, but you can disable the use of this cookie if desired. For instance, if your site or application is targeted towards children under 13, you should disable the use of cookies. For information about the specific data tracked in the cookie, please refer to: What information is stored in Mux Data HTML cookies.

This is done by setting disableCookies: true in the options.

// player here is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  disableCookies: true,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

Over-ride 'do not track' behavior

By default, Mux plugins for HTML5-based players do not respect Do Not Track when set within browsers. This can be enabled in the options passed to Mux, via a setting named respectDoNotTrack. The default for this is false. If you would like to change this behavior, pass respectDoNotTrack: true.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  respectDoNotTrack: true,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

Customize error tracking behavior

By default, @mux/mux-data-theoplayer will track errors emitted from the video element as fatal errors. If a fatal error happens outside of the context of the player, you can emit a custom error to the mux monitor.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
let monitor = initTHEOPlayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

// emit the `error` event when an error occurs
monitor.emit('error', {
  player_error_code: 100,
  player_error_message: 'Description of error',
  player_error_context: 'Additional context for the error'
});

When triggering an error event, it is important to provide values for player_error_code and player_error_message. The player_error_message should provide a generalized description of the error as it happened. The player_error_code must be an integer, and should provide a category of the error. If the errors match up with the HTML Media Element Error, you can use the same codes as the corresponding HTML errors. However, for custom errors, you should choose a number greater than or equal to 100.

In general you should not send a distinct code for each possible error message, but rather group similar errors under the same code. For instance, if your library has two different conditions for network errors, both should have the same player_error_code but different messages.

The error message and code are combined together and aggregated with all errors that occur in your environment in order to find the most common errors that occur. To make error aggregation as useful as possible, these values should be general enough to provide useful information but not specific to each individual error (such as stack trace).

You can use player_error_context to provide instance-specific information derived from the error such as stack trace or segment-ids where an error occurred. This value is not aggregated with other errors and can be used to provide detailed information. Note: Please do not include any personally identifiable information from the viewer in this data.

Error translator

If your player emits error events that are not fatal to playback or the errors are unclear and/or do not have helpful information in the default error message and codes you might find it helpful to use an error translator or disable automatic error tracking all together.

function errorTranslator (error) {
  return {
    player_error_code: translateCode(error.player_error_code),
    player_error_message: translateMessage(error.player_error_message),
    player_error_context: translateContext(error.player_error_context)
  };
}

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  errorTranslator,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

If you return false from your errorTranslator function then the error will not be tracked. Do this for non-fatal errors that you want to ignore. If your errorTranslator function itself raises an error, then it will be silenced and the player's original error will be used.

Disable automatic error tracking

In the case that you want full control over what errors are counted as fatal or not, you may want to consider turning off Mux's automatic error tracking completely. This can be done by passing automaticErrorTracking: false in the configuration object.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  automaticErrorTracking: false,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

Ads tracking with @mux/mux-data-theoplayer

Mux has been tested with and supports THEOplayer's Ads integration. Simply configure the ads as you would with THEOplayer normally, and Mux will track ads automatically. No additional configuration is needed.

Other THEOplayer ad integrations, such as Google IMA, may work out of the box but have not currently been tested. Please contact us with any questions.

Customize beacon collection domain

If you have integrated a custom domain for Data collection, specify your custom domain by setting beaconCollectionDomain.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  beaconCollectionDomain: 'CUSTOM_DOMAIN', // ex: 'foo.bar.com'
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

Destroy the monitor

In some cases, you may want to stop tracking an instance of THEOplayer. To this, we provide a destroy method within the returned object of initTHEOplayerMux, which will immediately end the active Mux Data view and stop tracking the THEOplayer instance.

// player is the instance of THEOplayer.Player
let monitor = initTHEOplayerMux(player, {
  debug: false,
  data: {
    env_key: "ENV_KEY",
    // ...
  }
});

// once ready to destroy the monitor
monitor.destroy();