Opencast 18: Release Notes
Opencast 18.2
This version contains two security fixes! One of them is a cross-site-scripting vulnerability in the Paella Player. The other allowed accidental publishing in the Opencast Editor. More detailed security advisories will be published shortly. It is advised to update to this version in a timely fashion.
This version also contains new releases of both the admin ui (18.x-2025-09-29) and the editor (18.x-2025-09-29).
Opencast 18.1
Among other bug fixes, this version contains a security fix. Please see #6979 and GHSA-hq8m-v68g-8cf8 (once published) for details.
As a minor feature, it is now possible to pass additional arguments to whisper.cpp (#6966).
This version also contains new releases of both the admin ui (18.x-2025-08-29) and the editor (18.x-2025-08-29).
Opencast 18.0
Features
- JWT support has been improved by standardizing the JWT schema. This is the groundwork for further support of JWT to ease the connection of external systems to Opencast. [#6177]
- Added the ability to configure S3 buckets for each organization. [#6253]
- Opencast now supports plugins with different modules on different distributions. [#6303]
- Various improvements to full-text search [#6498]
- Added support for audio-only uploads [#5856]
- Added the mux WOH which is able to encode multiple tracks into one. [#6894]
Breaking Changes
- The animate service and workflow operation have been removed. Make sure to update your custom workflows, if you used this operation. [#6518]
- All SoX related modules have been removed. Any workflows depending on this should switch to ffmpeg based normalization. [#6682]
- The crop service is now a plugin and disabled by default. If you have used it in previous versions, you need to enable
it in
etc/org.opencastproject.plugin.impl.PluginManagerImpl.cfg. [#6303] - The required Java version is now 21. [#6472]
- We switched to using the new default binary names used by Whisper.cpp. The default model directory is now /usr/share/whisper.cpp/models [#6794]
Configuration Changes
- Series, Editor and Login-Buttons in the PaellaPlayer are now disabled by default. [#6479] [#6480] [#6481]
- The feature "Episode ID Roles" is now a core feature: enabled by default with no option to disable. [#6696] If you have not used this feature before, you'll need to perform an index rebuild. See upgrade guide for details.
- The default workflows partial-publish and partial-preview have been modified to enable audio-only processing. If you want to use this feature and use your own workflows, have a look at the required changes in the PR. [#5856]
For more details, please take a look at the full changelog. If you want to update Opencast from a previous version, you should also read the upgrade guide.
Release Schedule
| Date | Phase |
|---|---|
| June 19, 2025 | Release Branch Cut |
| July 24, 2025 | Release of Opencast 18.0 |
Release Managers
- Dennis Benz (Osnabrück University)
- Jonas Dühring (elan e.V.)