Opencast 12: Release Notes

Opencast 12.5

The fifth maintenance release of Opencast 12.

Security related changes are:

• Paella Player 6: Validate redirect to login page

Notable changes are:

• Tobira: The harvesting API now identifies the master playlist of events with multiple HLS streams. This is needed for example when you are using the multiencode operation; without this information, the quality selection in Paella can't work in Tobira. (See also elan-ev/tobira#573.) If this affects you, you need to re-synchronize your Tobira instance (cf. [#4370]).
• Fix for wrong type handling in the encode WOH (cf. [#4382]).
• Fix for live publications not being retracted (cf. [#4250]).
• Azure transcription service improvements (cf. [#4441]).
• Editor: Let Editor know if files are available locally (cf. [#4411]).
• LDAP: Do not add the roleprefix to extra roles (cf. [#4377]).
• E-Mail: Use UTF-8 as charset for HTML mails (cf. [#4375]).

New Features and updates: - Initialization of new event ACL with series ACL in the Admin UI is now configurable (cf. [#4249]).

There are more bug fixes. See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 12.4

The fourth maintenance release of Opencast 12. Notable changes are:

• Stand-Alone Video Editor: Edit subtitles and create thumbnails.
  • Both features are disabled by default and will require additional configuration.
• Stand-Alone Video Editor: Usability and accessibility improvements (tooltips, high contrast mode) and bug fixes
• Paella Player 7: Updates
• Admin UI: Save button for event/series "Access policy"-tab
• Bug fixes

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 12.3

The third maintenance release of Opencast 12. Notable changes are:

• Added Tobira connector to allow Opencast to work with the new video portal
• Fixed deletion of scheduled events
• Fix MariaDB upgrade script

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 12.2

The second maintenance release of Opencast 12. Notable changes:

• New Opencast Studio version including dark mode feature
• Fix OAI-PMH
• Update CAS documentation
• Bugfix update the MariaDB database driver (again)
• Use an event title fallback from Dublin Core catalog while publishing to Engage
• Update the migration script installation instructions, which will otherwise fail with newer versions of the MariaDB Python connector

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 12.1

The first maintenance release of Opencast 12. Notable changes:

• New editor version including dark mode feature
• Updated Paella Player 7 beta version
• Fix email sending
• Fix MariaDB database driver
• Allow creating a new event with metadata from another event
• Azure transcription integration

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 12.0

Features

• Opencast 12 ships Paella Player 6.5.6 as its new default player.
• Paella Player 7 supporting new features like CSS customization is now included and can be configured as an alternative player.
• Upgrade the Standalone Video Editor to version 2022-06-15.
• Upgrade Opencast Studio to version 2022-06-15 coming with plenty new accessibility features.
• You can now define workflows in YAML. An example workflow written in YAML is provided. Documentation is available.
• The new publication to workspace workflow operation handler allows you to copy media package elements from existing publications [#3554].

Improvements

• ActiveMQ is no longer required by Opencast. It is safe to uninstall.
• In case a request to Elasticsearch fails because of an ElasticsearchStatusException, you can now configure Opencast to try again. For this, set max.retry.attempts.[get|update] in etc/org.opencastproject.elasticsearch.index.ElasticsearchIndex.cfg to something higher than 0. Set retry.waiting.period.[get|update] to a time period in ms to wait between retries (default: 1 second) so you don't overwhelm Elasticsearch. Both parameters can be configured separately for read-only actions and those that also update or delete, since arguably the success of the latter is more important. Changing this config does not require a restart of Opencast. See our Elasticsearch docs for more details.
• The Series Service does not require a Solr Index anymore, simplifying the installation of Opencast.
• The Workflow Service does not require a Solr Index anymore, simplifying the installation of Opencast.
• Workflows' data is now atomically stored in the database instead of XML to improve access speed. [#3376]
• You can now specify a fallback language and use a placeholder in the Vosk-based Speech to Text Workflow Operation Handler.
• Improved performance when rebuilding the Elasticsearch event index. [#3775]
• Documentation for developers and testers has been added explaining how to explore Opencast's H2 database.

Behavior changes

• Due to the lack of usage and thus testing, official support of Opencast for MySQL databases is dropped. Please use MariaDB or PostegreSQL instead. This does not mean that Opencast will stop working with MySQL immediately, but we like to highlight that developers are not spending any time on testing this, nor do we provide any configuration examples or support if additional steps may be necessary.
• The syntax of the JDBC connection configuration for MariaDB has slightly changed to an update of the MariaDB Connector/J. When upgrading make sure to follow the upgrade guide.
• Events for the same location can now be scheduled without a buffer time between them. [#1370]
• Changed inbox behaviour for additional files for scheduled events. [#3687]
• Identifiers for auto-generated capture series are now generated slightly different. This may cause new series to be generated for capture agents in some cases. [#3810]

API changes

• [#3204] removes the fulltext search query from the series endpoint and adds it to the External API.
• [#3376] removes the tasks.json endpoint from the admin interface job endpoint.
• [#3376] adds an endpoint to check for active workflows on a mediapackage to the workflow service.
• The endpoint to search through workflows has been removed from the workflow service.

Release Schedule

Release Managers

• Felix Pahlow (Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg)
• Lars Kiesow (ELAN e.V.)