Buggy-ness in the APIs

This has been happening for a while now, but as of recently it's been getting a lot worse.

1) A LOT of videos are coming back with a duration of 0 from the api.

2) I recently started noticing that a lot of recent non-premium videos are returning "permission error" when trying to play them. The new Grubber Lang punchout #4 is having this issue but the
#3 is working fine when played through the APIs.

@ev77: I think some of these issues should be resolved with a fix that's going out today, but check back in a day or two and let me know if they persist.

@rorie: unfortunately the issue is persisting. Still getting errors on punch out 4 and the latest GMM among others.

Hmm, ok, I might need to file another bug for this. Check today's Grubber as well and let me know if the error persists.

@rorie: Looks like the latest punch out is also having the issue(#5).

Posted in the new video player thread, but if it helps here's some pictures of what I think ev77 is talking about.

Gallery

This has been an issue for me for a few weeks. Friday Night Forking episodes 2 and 3 from this season are showing as zero length. The VMDT with Vinny never appeared in the video feed (on my Apple TV, though I could see it on the site). Unable to start the PSVR2 video today.

The Apple TV apps are basically useless at this point, unfortunately. If all I can watch it live stuff on Twitch, my premium membership seems superfluous. Real shame

I'm not sure if this is related to any of the issues previously reported, but it looks like video URLs served from the cdn.jwplayer.com domain have an extremely short expiry date (approx. 5 minutes). I'm guessing this is as an alternative to passing an API key? In any case, this is likely behind some of the playback issues people have been experiencing in client apps.

@conmulligan: The links don't seem to work at all directly in avplayer? If I copy the link and paste it to a browser it does some redirecting to a new URL but the URL doesn't seem to be static from what I saw. Are you able to get the urls to work natively in avplayer?

Also the expiration is 100% just the epoch conversion of the current time + 5 minutes. The sig on the other hand I'm unsure about but it is tied to the specific exp time that is returned so I imagine something that merges the video Id and the exp time and does some manner of encoding or similar to it to generate a unique sig for every exp time.

Either way a huge PITA and a clear sign no one at fandom cares about the API or 3rd party apps. They don't get that sweet ad revenue otherwise...

@ev77: Generally speaking, my AVPlayer configuration still works — I'm just passing an `AVPlayerItem` with the destination URL and AVPlayer follows the redirect like you'd expect. It does have some trouble resuming playback if you leave a video paused for an extended period of time that I suspect might be caused by these changes, but I haven't really investigated yet.

@conmulligan: Hmm, are you appending the api key as well? I've tried both appending and creating the player item using just the URL and in both cases it fails. Might be a tvOS thing as I'm not seeing any redirect?

@ev77: Yep, the API key is still being appended. Could very well be a tvOS-specific issue! You might be able to gain some insight by inspecting the `accessLog()` on `AVPlayerItem` — each event has a `uri` property that contains the canonical asset URL for that point in time.

At least it looks like the spamming of 0 byte uploads has stopped since the PSVR2 video... however, nothing new has been added since.

@tandar1: I'm having the same issue, looks like the Synology Download Station app is getting a new URL with the expiry key after each RSS update - then seeing these as new files. For me, I have these auto downloading to my Plex server, with this bug i was downloading all files each hour when it refreshed. Burnt through a few Tbs before I spotted it!

Having the old filenames back would also be appreciated rather than the jumble we're getting now!

@dmacdon: Ah good to know I'm not the only Synology user. I see one new video on the feed. I imagine there are more that are missing though.

It's unfortunate, does not seem like this is getting any attention and will not be resolved?

Videos are now back to 40-50 copies trying to download.

For the past 2 days it looks like the RSS feeds and video download issues have been fixed (for me at least).

Shout out to @rorie and team for working on these issues, it is appreciated!

Thanks for the update @windex! I'll give this a try when I get home tonight.