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"Video not found or access denied" for preroll ads

3 replies [Last post]
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Hi,

I have a weird error on our preroll ads:
After 4-5 times the preroll ads stops showing and the error "Video not found or access denied" is shown with the URL of the ad (an absolute path). It is strange, because the problem does not subsist when I empty the cache, and without loading the page again, just by clicking on play it works again for a couple of ads, until it stops working again (sometimes after 5 sometimes after 20 clicks). (It does not resolve anything when I only empty the cookies.) This problem also ONLY occurs with Firefox (8.0.1. and 9.0.1) and not with Chrome or IE. It is also strange, because even though I had this problem on three different computers, I had it tested by other people and they told me it works fine for them. The Ad-Agency told me there isn't any related problem on their end and the same system works fine for all other sites using the system. You can find the trailers here:
http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/

Any ideas?
Thank you so much.
Best
Frederic

Reply

Hi Federic,

I did manage to reproduce it... after a period of time (a number of refreshes of the page), the pre-roll wasn't playing anymore.

What I noticed is this:

1. The ad tag being called is:

http://ad.dc2.adtech.de/?advideo/3.0/1076.1/3146677/0//cc=2;vidAS=pre_roll;vidRT=VAST;vidRTV=2.0 @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/

2. That ad tag is not returning an ad when the problem occurs. It returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<VideoAdServingTemplate xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="vast.xsd">
  <Ad id="ADTECH Default Ad -3">
    <Wrapper>
      <AdSystem>ADTECH</AdSystem>
      <VASTAdTagURL><URL></URL></VASTAdTagURL>
      <Impression><URL></URL></Impression>
    </Wrapper>
  </Ad>
</VideoAdServingTemplate>

3. The debug output for the instance when no ad is playing seems to also reflect that there isn't an ad to play:

13:48:32 GMT+0000: Loading VAST data from AdTech - request is http://ad.dc2.adtech.de/?advideo/3.0/1076.1/3146677/0//cc=2;vidAS=pre_roll;vidRT=VAST;vidRTV=2.0 @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: OVA initialisation complete. @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Loaded 203 bytes for the VAST template @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Number of video ad serving templates returned = 1 @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Parsing a V2.0 VAST response - 1 ads in the template... @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: No InLine tag found for Ad - ADTECH Default Ad -3 - ignoring this entry @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Parsing DONE @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: VAST Template parsed and ready to use @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Merging the returned templates back into 1 master template... @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Merge complete - 0 ads recorded in the master template @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: AdSchedule: notified that template has been loaded @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: VASTController: notified that template has been fully loaded @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Looking for a Video Ad pre-roll0-0 @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/
13:48:32 GMT+0000: Could not find Video Ad pre-roll0-0 in the VAST template @ http://www.critic.de/film/ich-reise-allein-3150/trailer/

I think a good tests for you to do is - wait until you see the problem again, then in the same browser tab as the player, pop the ad tag into the URL bar and see what it's returning. If it's returning an empty response as we see above, then the question is - what's causing that? Think we'll need some guidance from the adtech team on that one to understand the source of that issue.

Finally, I noticed that you are running 0.4.4 - there's a much much later version available now on the OVA Developer Site (http://developer.longtailvideo.com/ova) - at some point it may be worth registering on their and grabbing either RC5 or RC6 from the "Download the Latest" page as it contains a tonne of bug fixes that may help you along the line...

Paul

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PS: Sorry I should have added - I didn't manage to get the "access denied problem", but rather it just stopped showing a pre-roll.

Would you mind giving me more information on how to reproduce the "access denied" problem? Do you literally refresh the page multiple times, or just keep pressing "play" multiple times in the same page session? (sorry I wasn't completely clear on that from your original description).

Also, I'm wondering - what happens if you try running RC5 with your setup? Do you still get the same problem with the very latest version of OVA?

Paul

Reply

Hi Paul,
thanks for your input. Unfortunately I don't know what solved the problem (we made a few manips at the same time), but the problem does not occur any more. BTW we switched to the newest version of OVA.
(Strangely in my case originally it didn't just stop showing prerolls but it showed an error-message so that it wasn't even possible to watch the videos/skip the preroll-)
Best
Frederic

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