Acceptance criteria

Error management of current players has been discussed.
Potential improvements (if any) have been identified.
Situations in which we cannot improve the messages have been documented.
Decide which changes can be made in existing Letterbox players and which will be only implemented in Pillarbox.

Tasks

[x] List what we learn.
[x] Write down decisions.

JordanMontel commented 2 years ago

JIRA issues:

defagos commented 2 years ago

Network issues

Web: Does not make sense to display anything special as the player is loaded with the surrounding page (metadata and manifest). Network error detection is lacking anyway.
Mobile: We currently detect network errors and recover automatically when the network is reachable again. This is valuable on mobile where network might be unreliable.

DRM Errors / Geoblocking

Web: For DRMs issues a link is displayed to a support page. This approach could also be extended to geoblocking errors (troubleshooting page with instructions about VPN, Private Relay for iOS or contact to support as last resort).
Mobile: No link is currently provided and DRM issues are reported in an opaque way on Apple platforms. This could be improved (more informative error messages and link). Same could be applied for geoblocking errors.
We already have a tool to help users find the issue. A documentation is also available.

Other blocking reasons (commercial, legal, availability)

These are not real errors, only the proper message needs to be displayed to the user.

Other errors (e.g. 404 on a URN)

Web: Displays The content cannot be played and a Copy debug info link.
Mobile: Displays The content cannot be played.

The message is simple and hides irrelevant error information to users. We don't think it can be improved in a meaningful way. Two other possible improvements, though:

Add a Copy debug info link on all players or, better, make this link open these information in a mail application directly.
Do not display any Copy debug info links but automatically gather issues with our monitoring tool. This avoids relying on users for issue reporting and can be notified through dashboards, mails or notifications.