No way to catch errors on instantiation

This was first mentioned in #57, but note that it is a separate issue hence the new ticket.

When instantiating a player with new Vimeo.Player() with a URL that triggers a 404 (not found) or 403 (privacy settings) error, there is no way to catch this error.

Expected Behavior

player = new Vimeo.Player( ... ) // with private video ID
player.on( 'error', ... )

Error handler is called.

Actual Behavior

Error handler is not called.

Steps to Reproduce

See above

---

This makes for pretty terrible UX when the player is embedded in a webapp. The user gets no visual feedback from the player; it just doesn’t load. And since no error handler is called it’s also impossible to give feedback via the app interface about it.

The only way is around it is to use loadVideo, which does give you a way to intercept errors (although this doesn’t work sometimes either, that’s what #57 is about). The problem here is, there is no way to create a player without first setting a video url and therefore loading it, as the player on instantiation checks the iframe for a valid source and blows up if it doesn’t find one. So we have to do a workaround of initially set a url to a small dummy video to get the player instantiated, and then call loadVideo to load the actual video and check for errors.

Please give us some way to catch errors during instantiation. 🙏

[tenacex]

Hey guys, the fix is out in: https://github.com/vimeo/player.js/releases/tag/v2.6.2

Sorry for the delay. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

[rijk]

That works, awesome! Even though I had to change it slightly to:

player = new Vimeo.Player( ... )
player.ready().catch(...)

Otherwise the player variable would not be a reference to the actual player in case of a successful instantiation.

Unfortunately, the error you receive here does not contain any status codes, the only thing you have is the message, which is variable as well (“https://vimeo.com/...” is not embeddable.). So you’d be stuck having to do a regex check on the error message (and pray they never change it) facepalm

What I do now is ‘simply’ call the API myself, and check the HTTP status code of the return.