Opencast 18: Release Notes
Opencast 18.3
This minor release includes a fix for the silence detection with newer FFmpeg versions. [#7069]
This version also contains new releases of both the admin ui (18.x-2025-10-24) and the editor (18.x-2025-10-24).
Opencast 18.2
This version contains two security fixes! One of them is a cross-site-scripting vulnerability in the Paella Player (see GHSA-m2vg-rmq6-p62r). The other allowed accidental publishing in the Opencast Editor (see GHSA-x6vw-p693-jjhv) 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.)