Opencast 7: Release Notes

New Features

• Overhaul of the permission management with the newly added possibility to define how access control lists are evaluated and how series permission changes are populated to episodes. For more details take a look at the access control configuration guide.
• Update Elasticsearch and make it possible to run Elasticsearch as an external service.
• Per-Tenant Capture Agent Users
• Asset manager snaphots clean-up to remove older snapshots for a given media package. In some cases, this can drastically reduce Opencast's storage consumption. This feature is implemented as an option for the asset-delete workflow operation handler.
• Allow the workflow to select the audio track for composite video
• Add multi-tenant support for all list providers
• Make waveform size configurable
• Create a generic user interface configuration service
• In the events table add a link to the series details
• Add internationalization support for series LTI tools
• Display creator of workflow
• Allow the ingest service to make authenticated requests to other servers
• Some modules are now plugins. These are not started by default to reduce the amount of code running unnecessarily. They can easily be enabled in etc/org.apache.karaf.features.cfg. Modified modules are:
  • Moodle user directory
  • Sakai user directory

Improvements

• Improved performance when scheduling new events or checking for conflicts (reducing the time for adding multiple schedules by up to 90%).

Configuration changes

• etc/org.opencastproject.scheduler.impl.SchedulerServiceImpl.cfg has a new option maintenance which temporarily disables the scheduler if set to true.
• KARAF_NOROOT is now set to true by default, preventing Opencast to be started as root user unless the configuration is changed.
• The default configuration for the Paella player has been moved to etc/ui-config/mh_default_org/paella/config.json
• By default, metadata catalogs and attachments sent by capture agents are discarded since this data is usually controlled by Opencast and the routing through capture agents which existed for historical reasons was just an additional source for errors. If you rely on the old behavior, it can be configured in etc/org.opencastproject.ingest.impl.IngestServiceImpl.cfg.
• By default, the Paella player now respects all tracks published to engage instead of having a hard-coded filter for tracks with the sub-flavor delivery only.
• The structure of the configuration files concerning URL signing has changed. See the stream security configuration for more details.

API changes

Due to MH-13397:

• Modified GET /recordings/{id}/technical.json: Removed field optOut
• Removed GET /recordings/{id}/optOut
• Removed GET /recordings/{id}/reviewStatus
• Removed PUT /recordings/{id}/reviewStatus
• Modified POST /recordings: Removed form parameter optOut
• Modified POST /recordings/multiple: Removed form parameter optOut
• Modified PUT /recordings/{id}: Removed form parameters optOut and updateOptOut
• Removed GET /series/{id}/optOut

Due to MH-13446:

• Removed GET /acl-manager/transitions.json
• Removed GET /acl-manager/transitionsfor.json
• Removed POST /acl-manager/episode/{id}
• Removed POST /acl-manager/series/{id}
• Modified POST /acl-manager/apply/episode/{id}: Removed form parameters workflowDefinitionId and workflowParams
• Modified POST /acl-manager/apply/series/{id}: Removed form parameters workflowDefinitionId and workflowParams
• Removed DELETE /acl-manager/episode/{transitionId}
• Removed DELETE /acl-manager/series/{transitionId}
• Removed PUT /acl-manager/episode/{transitionId}
• Removed PUT /acl-manager/series/{transitionId}

Additional Notes About 7.1

Opencast 7.1 is the first maintenance release for Opencast 7. It fixes a bug with the scheduler migration which may have caused minor issues for old, processed events which were missing some metadata. If you have already migrated to Opencast 7.0 and experience this problem, simply re-start the scheduler migration and re-build the index once more.

Additional Notes About 7.2

Opencast 7.2 fixes a bug in the video editor configuration present in Opencast 7.0 to 7.1 which will cause Opencast to always silently skip the video editor and publish the whole video. The problem was introduced by a fix in the default workflows and later fixed again by a configuration change therein . If you use the default workflows, please make sure to update to the latest state of the workflows.

If you use your own workflow and did not adapt the first patch, you should not be affected by this problem at all. If you are, just make sure that source and target smil flavor for the editor workflow operation are identical like it is ensured by the official fix. A proper solution not relying on specific configurations and less error prone is in work and will be added to the upcoming major Opencast release.

Additional Notes About 7.3

Opencast 7.3 fixes a bug where the audio-source-name parameter of the composite operation defaults to none instead of "dual" in distributed systems, causing the resulting video to have no audio. A workaround for this problem entails setting audio-source-name to "dual" explicitly. Additionally this release fixes another problem in the composite WOH where using the watermark tool causes the operation to fail.

This release also solves a major problem during the index rebuild of the workflow service where the process will sometimes fail with an OutOfMemory error because it's attempting to load all workflows at once. This problem is averted by loading and processing the workflows in increments instead. If you encountered this problem or plan to update to 7 and have a lot of workflows in your system, you should update to 7.3.

7.3 also ensures that the start dates shown in the events table and in the event details are once more consistent by using the bibliographic for both instead of showing the technical date in the events table since this can't be updated via UI for uploaded events and leads to confusion.

Last but not least this release also fixes a known security vulnerability in Apache Santuario, so it is encouraged to update.

Aditional Notes About 7.4

Opencast 7.4 brings a performance fix for some queries in the search API that can cause Opencast to run out of memory.

This release also gives back a patch that was in version 6.x that allows to filter capture agent roles for ACLs and fixes the date cell of the events overview table in the admin UI.

Finally, Opencast 7.4 also brings an update to the CAS security example that was out of date.

Release Schedule

Date	Phase
April 1st 2019	Feature Freeze
May 6th - May 12th 2019	Translation week
May 13th - May 26th 2019	Public QA phase
June 13th 2019	Release of Opencast 7.0

Release Managers

• Maximiliano Lira Del Canto (University of Cologne)
• Katrin Ihler (ELAN e.V.)