remotion-dev/remotion · error · Error

Could not locate the video opening element

Error message

Could not locate the video opening element

What it means

getMutedSourceEdit, when no existing 'muted' attribute is found, needs the <Video> element's openingElement span to append a new muted attribute. It throws when the openingElement AST node has no source location, since the insertion offset cannot be computed.

Solutions

1. Ensure the target element comes from the recast parse of real source code, not from hand-built AST nodes.
2. If the element was transformed earlier, re-parse the printed source and re-locate the Video element before running this codemod.
3. Preserve loc on cloned elements (copy openingElement.loc).
4. Catch the error in your pipeline and skip the file with a warning rather than aborting the whole batch.

Example fix

// before: synthesized element without loc
const el = j.jsxElement(j.jsxOpeningElement(j.jsxIdentifier('Video'), []), ...);
getMutedSourceEdit({element: el, input});
// after: use the parsed element
const el = findVideoElement(parse(input));
getMutedSourceEdit({element: el, input});

if (!element.openingElement.loc) {
  throw new Error('Video opening element lacks loc; use a parsed node');
}

const hasOpeningLoc = (el: t.JSXElement) => el.openingElement.loc != null;

try {
  const edit = getMutedSourceEdit({element, input, getAttributeName});
} catch (err) {
  // locate the Video element in a fresh parse and retry
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling the codemod with a JSXElement whose openingElement.loc is null — the element was synthesized in memory, cloned without loc, or the source was parsed without location recording.

Common situations: Generated Video elements passed into the split transform; chained codemods where an earlier step rebuilt the element node; custom tooling constructing AST nodes by hand.

Understand the failure class

Background: 'Could not be found', 'does not exist', 'not found in database': the resource-not-found family when an ID, slug, key, or URI lookup comes back empty — this error's family across 20 libraries.

Related errors

• Could not locate the JSX element to move
• Could not locate the JSX reorder target
• Could not locate the muted attribute
• Cannot duplicate a JSX element without a source location
• Cannot duplicate JSX element with no parent

AI-assisted analysis of remotion-dev/remotion@46a3a6bf13 (2026-09-18). Data as JSON: /api/errors/99b876d08f4cae8d. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at packages/studio-codemods/src/split-video-from-audio.ts:196

}): SourceEdit => {
	const existingMuted = element.openingElement.attributes.find(
		(attribute) => getAttributeName(attribute) === 'muted',
	);
	if (existingMuted) {
		if (!existingMuted.loc) {
			throw new Error('Could not locate the muted attribute');
		}

		return {
			start: recastLocToOffset(input, existingMuted.loc.start),
			end: recastLocToOffset(input, existingMuted.loc.end),
			replacement: 'muted',
		};
	}

	const {openingElement} = element;
	if (!openingElement.loc) {
		throw new Error('Could not locate the video opening element');
	}

	const openingStart = recastLocToOffset(input, openingElement.loc.start);
	const openingEnd = recastLocToOffset(input, openingElement.loc.end);
	const closingStart = openingEnd - (openingElement.selfClosing ? 2 : 1);
	const lineStart = input.lastIndexOf('\n', closingStart - 1) + 1;
	const beforeClosing = input.slice(lineStart, closingStart);

	if (lineStart > openingStart && /^[\t ]*$/.test(beforeClosing)) {
		const lastAttribute = openingElement.attributes.at(-1);
		const attributeIndent = lastAttribute?.loc
			? getLineIndent({
					input,
					offset: recastLocToOffset(input, lastAttribute.loc.start),
				})
			: `${getLineIndent({input, offset: openingStart})}${getIndentationUnit(
					input,
					prettierConfigOverride,

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