How to handle video playback failures

When playing videos on an Echo Show you may experience various error scenarios:

• In case you replay material from external resources it turns out that some videos will not play on some Echo devices while they will work on others.

• Some urls may not work because of server downtimes.

• Some urls may not work because they are out of date.

• Some urls may not work because the network is broken.

Unfortunately the APL Video component does not offer an error handler to respond gracefully in such scenarios.

This example describes a workaround:

The idea is to fade in a delayed error message which is only visible in case the video does not appear.

This will not catch up every error scenario but it is definitely better than a black screen.

Possible improvements: instead of a simple text message you could respond with detailed advice how to proceed or a more or less simple animation.