Matomo shows “Unknown” as video title sometimes and correct title sometimes

The actual name of the “Trauma Healing” video is “创伤医治” in Chinese characters.

Thank you for the reply.

We are using Matomo’s Media Analytics.

I did not mention this in the ticket, but this only is happening on some of the visits to the site and not on all visits. So, it is working to correctly track the videos in most cases it seems.

I used developer tools as you recommended, but did not see the resulting error.

Matomo support wrote, “A Media Analytics tracking request usually starts with a “ma_” parameter (Only “Events” are tracking using a parameter such as e_a or e_n for example).”

I am going through the matomo_access.log.4, but have not seen evidence yet that points to the problem.

Thanks,
Mark

Martin:

Thank you for your response and patience as we work through this issue with you and Matomo support. You asked, “why do you need to use FV Player’s Matomo integration and Matomo Media Analytics?” We are using Matomo so that we have one source of analytics, and it is a single source of keeping analytics for multiple systems.

For this issue I found seven occurrences in the course of one 24-hour period that generated the “Unknown” video error. This does not happen on every play of FVPlayer videos but only on some of them. That has made it hard to reproduce. Most videos keep the title, but some do not.

Below I pasted two lines from the matomo.access.log file. You can see in these lines that “ma_ti=” has nothing after it. This is causing the “Unknown” issue when it occurs. During the 24-hour period of this data, it occurred seven time.

What is yet unknown is whether this missing title is as a result of the Matomo tracking code not being able to detect the title or if FVplayer is in certain circumstances not correctly setting the Title attribute for the video element in the webpage itself.

If the title isn’t present when Matomo scans the video element, then it can’t set the title in the tracking request – but there isn’t a guarantee that the video title is not present in the video element or if the Matomo tracking code is not correctly detecting it. Matomo support has not been able to reproduce the issue so far – which is one of the reasons they tried to find similarities between the visits that didn’t correctly track the video title so that they could try and reproduce it with the same device and determine what is happening.

Ultimately the question that needs answering is: Is the video title attribute present in the page (In the video element) at the time that the Matomo tracking code sends the Media Analytics tracking request.
If we can answer that question, then we can make some good progress on finding the cause.

Do you know if the video title attribute is present, or is there a possibility in the FVPlayer code that the video title attribute is not present?

two lines from matomo.access.log data that show no title was present (see ma_ti=):

< 172.70.143.71 - - [23/May/2022:16:18:40 +0000] "POST /matomo.php?ma_id=8Jd0so&ma_ti=&ma_pn=flowplayer&ma_mt=Video&ma_re=blob%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinganlushang.com%2Fb5c1a95d-f635-449a-ace4-a14bc991945a&ma_st=0&ma_ps=0&ma_le=NaN&ma_ttp=&ma_w=312&ma_h=176&ma_fs=0&ma_se=&ca=1&&idsite=1&rec=1&r=198888&h=23&m=18&s=37&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinganlushang.com%2Fchaoyuekunan%2F&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinganlushang.com%2F&_id=4e1194f2403d9898&_idn=0&_refts=1653322673&_ref=https%3A%2F%2Fgoogleads.g.doubleclick.net%2Fpagead%2Fads%3Fclient%3Dca-pub-5346757008396557%26output%3Dhtml%26h%3D300%26slotname%3D9842898139%26adk%3D3206041887%26adf%3D2475645798%26pi%3Dt.ma~as.9842898139%26w%3D320%26psa%3D0%26format%3D320x300%26url%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fvivtp.com%26wgl%3D1%26dt%3D1653322631463%26bpp%3D19%26bdt%3D2550%26idt%3D4056%26shv%3Dr20220518%26mjsv%3Dm202205170101%26ptt%3D9%26saldr%3Daa%26abxe%3D1%26prev_fmts%3D0x0%26nras%3D1%26correlator%3D2087881946157%26frm%3D20%26pv%3D1%26ga_vid%3D25931609.1653322632%26ga_sid%3D1653322635%26ga_hid%3D137255261%26ga_fc%3D1%26u_tz%3D420%26u_his%3D1%26u_h%3D760%26u_w%3D360%26u_ah%3D760%26u_aw%3D360%26u_cd%3D32%26u_sd%3D2%26adx%3D20%26ady%3D165%26biw%3D360%26bih%3D586%26scr_x%3D0%26scr_y%3D0%26eid%3D44759876%2C44759927%2C44759842%2C44760475%2C44760911%2C31067721%26oid%3D2%26pvsid%3D982946628615816%26pem%3D902%26tmod%3D1453064670%26nvt%3D1%26ref%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ffun.touchpal.com%2FIME_games%2Fgather_v3%2Findex.html%26loc%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fvivtp.com%2FgameVivtp%2FgameNewList%2FlineMatch%2Findex.html%26eae%3D0%26fc%3D1920%26brdim%3D0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C360%2C0%2C360%2C586%2C360%2C586%26vis%3D1%26rsz%3D%7C%7CaeE%7C%26abl%3DCA%26pfx%3D0%26fu%3D0%26bc%3D29%26ifi%3D2%26uci%3Da!2%26xpc%3Dl7iDdOyjIF%26p%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fvivtp.com%26dtd%3D4098&send_image=0&cookie=1&res=360x760&pf_net=0&pf_srv=1152&pf_tfr=285&pf_dm1=7488&pf_dm2=5650&pf_onl=25&pv_id=WqAXy2 HTTP/1.1" 204 267 "https://www.pinganlushang.com/chaoyuekunan/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; vivo 1820 Build/O11019; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.84 Mobile Safari/537.36 VivoBrowser/5.9.1.5"
47d45
< 172.69.34.85 - - [23/May/2022:20:16:15 +0000] "POST /matomo.php?ma_id=TbP0a0&ma_ti=&ma_pn=flowplayer&ma_mt=Video&ma_re=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinganlushang.com%2Fcht%2Fchaoyuekunan%2F&ma_st=0&ma_ps=0&ma_le=&ma_ttp=&ma_w=336&ma_h=189&ma_fs=0&ma_se=&ca=1&&idsite=1&rec=1&r=017423&h=4&m=16&s=12&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinganlushang.com%2Fcht%2Fchaoyuekunan%2F&urlref=https%3A%2F%2F94f3a08c2e1b50f29b06340d82d960ce.safeframe.googlesyndication.com%2F&_id=e436d3fc79a5994f&_idn=0&_refts=1653336970&_ref=https%3A%2F%2F94f3a08c2e1b50f29b06340d82d960ce.safeframe.googlesyndication.com%2F&send_image=0&cookie=1&res=385x854&pf_net=413&pf_srv=196&pf_tfr=159&pf_dm1=1837&pf_dm2=1240&pf_onl=15&pv_id=nM2fk4 HTTP/1.1" 204 266 "https://www.pinganlushang.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; SM-A426B Build/RP1A.200720.012; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/101.0.4951.61 Mobile Safari/537.36"
179d176

Thanks,
Mark

Martin:

Thank you for your answer. I relayed it to Matomo, and they said it was helpful. Most of the time the video name is recorded correctly in Matomo, but sometimes it is not. We have not found a pattern yet so that we can reproduce the error, so we do not know the source of the error. It could be a browser, device, FVPlayer or Matomo. Right now we are going to try to see if we can reproduce the error of see a pattern. I will try to contact you again if we can gain better insight or need your help to move closer to the solution. Thank you for you help so to this point.

Thanks,
Mark

Martin:

Matomo answered your question below about whether they use the flowplayer() function.

Here is their answer:

Yes, the tracking code for the Media Analytics plugin uses the flowpleyer() function.

Here is the excerpt from the tracking code in matomo.js where it gets the title using the flowplayer() function:

if (n() && !ay.getMediaTitle()) {
  var ar = p.getFirstParentWithClass(au, "flowplayer", 4);
  if (ar) {
    var az = flowplayer(ar);
    if (az && az.video && az.video.matomoTitle) {
      ay.setMediaTitle(az.video.matomoTitle)
    } else {
      if (az && az.video && az.video.piwikTitle) {
        ay.setMediaTitle(az.video.piwikTitle)
      } else {
        if (az && az.video && az.video.title) {
          ay.setMediaTitle(az.video.title)
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

As you’ll see from the example above, it checks for titles in the following order of preference: matomoTitle, piwikTitle, title

So as long as the flowplayer function has the title property set, the Matomo tracking code should be able to track it correctly.

Thanks,
Mark