Content Player Playback Monitoring for Buffering Detection
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current media players do not effectively track playback events or related data, making it difficult for content providers to troubleshoot issues and manage server demand, leading to poor user experience due to buffering, timeouts, and crashes during content streaming.
Innovation Solution
A method and system for monitoring and correcting playback performance by generating playback packets that include playback events, player states, and other relevant data, which are transmitted to a server for analysis, allowing real-time identification of playback issues and improvements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If playback events are tracked and transmitted to server, then user experience is improved through better troubleshooting, but network bandwidth is consumed by additional data transmission
Solution Approach 1:
The system changes the parameter of data transmission by only sending playback events when specific conditions are met (buffering events, crashes, timeouts) rather than continuous transmission. This selective parameter change reduces network bandwidth consumption while maintaining reliability improvement from tracking critical playback issues.
2Loss of time
If playback monitoring is implemented on all devices, then content delivery issues are identified faster, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The media player automatically monitors its own playback events and generates reports without requiring external intervention or complex configuration. The player self-services by tracking buffering, crashes, and timeouts, then autonomously transmits this data to the server, reducing the perceived complexity for users while enabling fast issue identification.
3Productivity
If detailed playback data is collected and transmitted, then server demand management is improved, but data processing load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the most relevant playback events (buffering, crashes, timeouts, playback completions) from the complete set of possible player data. By taking out only these critical events for transmission and analysis, the system improves server demand management while reducing the data processing load compared to analyzing all possible playback data.
Data Source
Figure 1~2
Figure 3
Figure 4A
AI summary
A method for monitoring and correcting playback performance for a content player. The method includes detecting a content play request from a content player on a user device, the content play request corresponding to a content item request from a server, generating a playback identifier including data corresponding to the content item, detecting one or more playback events occurring during playback of the content by the content player, generating one or more playback packets including the playback identifier, a packet identifier, and the one or more playback events, and transmitting the one or more playback packets to a server.