Opencast 15: Release Notes

Opencast 15.13

This is the "last-last" release of Opencast 15. An additional release was necessary due to the inclusion of an important bug fix in [#6306].
The release includes two bug fixes:

Opencast 15.12

This is the last release of Opencast 15.x.

It includes a bug fix related to the publication of subtitles for events without branding [#6156]. The bug was introduced in Opencast 15.8.

Opencast 15.11

This release includes a bug fix for the Tobira API ([#6157]).

Opencast 15.10

This release contains two bugfixes and a change to a test.

Opencast 15.9

This release fixes a critical bug which may cause ingests to fail. Please skip the 15.8 release and update to 15.9 directly.

Opencast 15.8

Bug Fixes

Improvements

Opencast 15.7

Opencast 15.7 release includes various smaller bug fixes and improvements.

Especially the admin interface (aka new admin ui) has received a lot of attention. To check all the changes look at these three releases: [2024-07-12], [2024-07-02] and [2024-06-12].

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 15.6

Attention: The fix for the handling of captions by the select-tracks operation (5829) requires the removal of the operation directly afterwards from the partial-publish workflow, otherwise captions will be duplicated during publication. This workflow has been fixed in 15.8 (see 6046 for details).

Behavior changes

Opencast 15.5

Improvements

Opencast 15.4

Bug Fixes

Improvements

Opencast 15.3

This release comes with another small change to the community workflows, please check if it works for you.

Configuration changes

Feature

Bug fixes

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 15.2

Opencast valentines edition! A small release this time, but Opencast 15.2 includes a small change to the standard workflows. Please check if it affects you.

Configuration changes

Feature

Bug fixes

Opencast 15.1

Opencast 15.1 includes important bug fixes and improvements.

Bug fixes

(New) Admin UI Bug fixes

Improvements

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Opencast 15.0

Features

Subtitles as first class citizens

With Opencast 15 we want to put more emphasis on subtitles. You can find more details on how subtitles should be handled going forward in Subtitles.

This comes with a bit of migration. Namely, subtitles should not be stored as "attachments" or "catalogs" anymore, but as "media" (as they are called in the Admin UI) or "tracks" (as they are called internally). Therefore, all subtitle files currently stored as attachments or catalogs in your events should be moved to tracks. This can easily be accomplished with the "changetype" workflow operation handler new to Opencast 15. See example below. (Subtitles should then be republished)

Additionally, we recommend adding a language tag lang:<language-code> to your subtitle files. While tags for subtitles are optional, the flavor will not encode the given language for a subtitle anymore, so a language tag is useful for identification and display purposes. You can read more about subtitles tags in Subtitles.

If your subtitles are not in WebVTT format, they should be converted to WebVTT as well. While other formats are possible, WebVTT is the only one that will be guaranteed to work.

Example workflow for changing subtitle type to track 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<definition xmlns="http://workflow.opencastproject.org">

  <id>change-subtitles</id>
  <title>Change Subtitles Type</title>
  <tags>
    <tag>archive</tag>
  </tags>
  <description></description>
  <operations>

    <!-- Add a language tag for the english subtitles -->

    <operation
        id="tag"
        description="Tagging media package elements">
      <configurations>
        <configuration key="source-flavors">captions/vtt+en</configuration>
        <configuration key="target-tags">+lang:en</configuration>
      </configurations>
    </operation>

    <!-- Change the type of all files with the "captions/*" flavor to track -->
    <!-- And their flavor to "captions/source" -->

    <operation
        id="changetype"
        description="Retracting elements flavored with presentation and tagged with preview from Engage">
      <configurations>
        <configuration key="source-flavors">captions/*</configuration>
        <configuration key="target-flavor">captions/source</configuration>
        <configuration key="target-type">track</configuration>
      </configurations>
    </operation>

    <!-- Save changes -->

    <operation
        id="snapshot"
        if="NOT (${presenter_delivery_exists} OR ${presentation_delivery_exists})"
        description="Archive publishing information">
      <configurations>
        <configuration key="source-tags">archive</configuration>
      </configurations>
    </operation>

    <!-- Clean up work artifacts -->

    <operation
        id="cleanup"
        fail-on-error="false"
        description="Remove temporary processing artifacts">
      <configurations>
        <!-- On systems with shared workspace or working file repository -->
        <!-- you want to set this option to false. -->
        <configuration key="delete-external">true</configuration>
        <!-- ACLs are required again when working through ActiveMQ messages -->
        <configuration key="preserve-flavors">security/*</configuration>
      </configurations>
    </operation>

  </operations>
</definition>

Improvements

Behavior changes

API changes

See changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Release Schedule

Date Phase
November 22, 2023 Feature Freeze
November 29, 2023 Translation week
December 06, 2023 Public QA phase
December 12, 2023 Release of Opencast 15.0

Release Managers