Specifications

Important notes

In order to properly monitor the measurement of your AV content, there are a few things you need to know.

play vs playbackStart

The events av.play (play) represent the first click on the play button, which starts loading the video.

The events av.start (playbackStart) represent the playback of the first frame of the content.

The classic sequence of events is therefore av.play followed by av.start. In between, the video loading time can be measured with events av.buffer.start followed by av.buffer.heartbeat..

If you are not able to differentiate these two times, it is necessary to send av.start (playbackStart).

start vs resume

If playback is resumed (after a pause or loading time (rebuffer) for example), it will be necessary to send an event av.resume (playbackResumed) rather than av.play.

Cursor position management

When using methods related to reading content, the cursor position is required.

This position makes it possible to know the real progress of the reading.

Playback speed management

In order to measure the position of the cursor, the libraries calculate the time actually spent playing. By default, one real second will correspond to one second of playing.

However, you can change this playback speed via the method setPlaybackSpeed, by specifying the speed factor.

Tracking examples

Full playback

seek event tracking

Automatic processing

Some automatic processings are managed by the tagging libraries.

However, it is necessary to know them and to take them into account when tagging not using libraries.

seek (seek start, forward/backward)

When calling a seek (seek) method, several events are raised:

• av.seek.start, indicating the start of seek, and bearing the cursor position before the move
• av.forward or av.backward, depending on the start and end positions of the cursor move
.

session id

Each playback session has a unique identifier (property av_session_id).

A playback session is defined by a content play. It stops if the content changes, or if the video is stopped (av.stop).

buffer vs rebuffer

Two types of loading times can be identified:

• buffer (av.buffer.start (bufferStart) and av.buffer.heartbeat), for loading before the start of playback (between av.play and av.start)
• rebuffer (av.rebuffer.start (bufferStart) and av.rebuffer.heartbeat), for loading during playback (after av.start)
).

The method bufferStart checks if a playbackStart has been called on the current session, in order to send the corresponding load type.

heartbeat

During playback, in order to measure durations more precisely, heartbeat events provide information on the status of the player.
Several types of heartbeat are available:

• av.heartbeat, triggers after a playbackStart or playbackResumed, allows to measure the content playback
• av.(re)buffer.heartbeat, triggers after a bufferStart, allows to measure the duration of loading times

The time between two heartbeats is defined at the moment of media instantiation. It can be fixed for the whole playback, or it can evolve via a JSON object.

On short media, we recommend to fill in 5 seconds between each heartbeat, in order to have a fine enough measurement without overloading the user’s network and the collection servers. On larger media, you should space heartbeats with more time, up to 30 minutes in order to keep the playback session alive.

duration

The time actually spent in front of the content is filled in the property av_duration, via a timer.

This is the time elapsed in milliseconds between the previous event and the current one.

previous event/position

On each event, it is necessary to fill in the position (av_previous_position) and the name (av_previous_event) of the previously sent event.