Opencast 17: Release Notes

Opencast 17.8

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 (17.x-2025-09-26) and the editor (17.x-2025-09-26).

Opencast 17.7

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 (17.x-2025-08-29) and the editor (17.x-2025-08-28).

Opencast 17.6

This version contains a security fix! Please see GHSA-j63h-hmgw-x4j7 for more details. It is advised to update to this version in a timely fashion.

Workflow variables containing a colon in the variable name can now be escaped with a backslash. Beforehand, the variable syntax ${var:iable} would interpret the part after the : as the default value if var was not defined. This is especially useful for workflow properties defined by analyze-mediapackage based on element tags like lang:en. Please note that this is a breaking change in the sense that the string "\:" will now be interpreted as a ":" (#6884).

Apart from that, this release contains multiple bug fixes, e.g. for timeouts in Stud.IP (#6825) and multi-threading for WhisperCPP (#6883) as well as snapshot deletion for remote storage ((#6885).

As a feature, we now accept AAI attributes as list (#6831).

There are also new versions of both the admin ui (17.x-2025-07-24 and the editor (17.x-2025-07-24 included.

Opencast 17.5

This release contains quite a few bug fixes and other improvements, most importantly a security fix for the paella player (#6783) and a bugfix for jwt tokens (#6791).

There are also new releases for both the admin ui (17.x-2025-06-27) and the editor (17.x-2025-06-19, but also see the release notes for 17.x-2025-06-18), respectively.

Additionally there is a minor change to the community workflows that should only affect adopters who ingest more than two streams (#6728).

An index migration script is added to allow updates from Opencast 16.x to 17.x without a reindex (#6524).

Opencast 17.4

This release contains a few bug fixes and enhancements of existing features. Among others, it enables the use of Elasticsearch even if the setup is in yellow state (#6681). It also adds an endpoint to trigger the update of a single event in search (#6653).

Most importantly, this contains a new version of both the Editor (17.x-2025-05-23) and the Admin UI (17.x-2025-05-24).

Additionally it contains a new version of Opencast Studio (2025-04-30) with a bugfix regarding incorrect error messages when uploading.

Opencast 17.3

This release contains a few bug fixes, among them performance improvements for the metrics endpoint (#6627). It's now also possible to trigger an index update for the archived information of an event (#6575).

Additionally, this contains new versions of both the Admin Interface (2025-04-17) and Studio (2025-04-02).

Opencast 17.2

This is a maintenance release of Opencast 17. It fixes a few minor bugs.

Opencast 17.1

This release contains a couple of bug fixes. It also includes new versions for the editor (2025-01-08) and the admin interface (2025-01-21). See the respective release notes for more details.

One can now also remove subtitles from within the editor [#6361] and configure asset upload options in more detail [#6362].

Opencast 17.0

Features

Breaking Changes

Configuration Changes

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
November 6, 2024 Release Branch Cut
December 4, 2024 Release of Opencast 17.0

Release Managers