Mobile Monitoring Test

Objective

Develop a solution to monitor/track mobile video player behavior.

Description

The solution will be developed with Android using the library ExoPlayer. The project is modularised to have media player activity ready for being used in different APKs for mobile, Android TV, and Instant App.

Set up

You can get the code from GitHub https://github.com/ivanmolto/exoplayer-monitoring.git

And as this is an Android Studio project, it can be imported with Android Studio as its own project. For importing the project, please start Android Studio and choose File -> New -> Import Project.. Once the build has finished, you will see two modules:

• The app module (with only a manifest).
• The player-lib. As you can see the app module merges in the player-lib module with a gradle dependency.

It is also interesting to mention the ExoPlayer dependencies as in this project only the following modules from ExoPlayer are used:

• com.google.android.exoplayer:exoplayer-core:2.8.0
• com.google.android.exoplayer:exoplayer-dash:2.8.0
• com.google.android.exoplayer:exoplayer-ui:2.8.0

Track Events

An ExoPlayer.EventListener has been implemented to track some events and send a console output every time one of the following events happen:

• The reproduction/video starts.
• The player is paused/resumed.
• The reproduction/video ends.

onPlayerStateChanged is called when the media player transitions from one playback state to another or if playback is played or set to pause. The playbackState reports the differents states of the playback:

• ExoPlayer.STATE_IDLE: The media player instantiated but still not prepared with a MediaSource.
• ExoPlayer.STATE_BUFFERING: Not enough data is buffered and so the media player is not able to play.
• ExoPlayer.STATE_READY: The media player is able to play from the current position. The first time playWhenReady is true, the media player starts to play media, the rest of the times the media player resumes. On the other hand, if playWhenReady is false, the player is paused.
• ExoPlayer.STATE_ENDED: The media player has finished playing.

Calculate Metrics

Every time a previous event happens, calculate and send a console output:

• Playhead (current video position, in seconds) playbackPosition.
• Total duration of the video totalDuration.
• % of video completion completion.
• Number of pauses/resumes that happened with reset after reproductions ends pauses/resumes.

Please see below a screenshot of monitoring mobile video player with this application.

Resources

To test the app we use the online video: https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4