Opencast 9: Release Notes

Important Changes

• Opencast now requires an external Elasticsearch server to function
• Paella is now the default video player
• The encode worfklow operation now completely replaces compose, which is dropped now
• MariaDB JDBC driver
• New LTI-Tools
• A completely new system for securing static file content has been integrated into Opencast 9.2. While is is not active by default for compatibility to older 9.x releases, it can be easily enabled and used to ensure access to static files has the same security checks you are already used to from the player and from other user interfaces.

Features

• Get notified when there is a new version of Opencast, and if your current version reached its end of life
• Sort events in the main event table by the number of publications they have
• Publish streaming elements using publish-configure
• Generate embed codes for videos right from the admin UI
• Extend support for resolution based encoding profiles through new conditional commands
• Allow filtering series and events by write access in the external API
• Support NUT container format
• Support playing 360 degree videos in Paella
• Optionally persist LTI users for the purpose of longer running processes like uploads using Opencast Studio
• Register as an adopter to potentially help us gather data and to receive news about the project
• Configure Opencast to trim the start and end automatically to help with issues of synchronizing audio and video streams
• Automatically generate subscriptions with the new AmberScript integration
• Do more with LTI: Create new events, edit or delete existing ones, or move them between series
• Export statistics to CSV using a new External API endpoint
• Edit event meta data in bulk with a new dialog in the admin UI
• Create Shibboleth users dynamically using configuration
• Support Serverless HLS
• Retract only specific flavors/tags with a new WOH
• New download button in the Theodul player
• New VideoGrid-WOH to handle grids of videos as presented for example by BigBlueButton
• Allow specifying role prefixes in various user providers to better distinguish users from different sources
• Adopter registration
• New version of Opencast Studio
• User and role provider for the Canvas LMS
• The partial import WOH can now do certain kinds of preprocessings to simplify further processing down the line
• Support for presigned S3 URLs

Improvements

• New Paella Player version
• Make the partial-import workflow operation more robust in the face of containers with multiple videos in them
• Multiple workflows with the same ID no longer bring Opencast down
• Respect LTI user data passed by the consumer when persistence is enabled
• Fix entering custom roles in the admin UI
• Support odd widths/heights in the default encoding profiles
• Make image extraction more robust for streams wihtout known duration
• Fix image extraction at frame 0
• The external API now returns the bibliographic start date instead of the technical one
• Silence detection now ignores the video streams making it faster in cases there are some
• Compatibility with Java 11
• Force-delete workflows with the workflow service API, for example when they are stuck for some reason
• Fix the hourly statistics export
• More logging during Solr search index rebuilds to enable catching issues more easily
• Configuration to enable tenant-specific capture agent users
• Make the ExecuteMany-WOH more flexible in its in- and output
• Fix processing videos with only one frame, like MP3s with an embedded image
• Wowza configuration can now be tenant-specific
• The Theodul embed code is now fully responsive
• Override certain Karaf/Opencast settings using environment variables directly
• The admin UI can now handle very long ACLs (> 300 entries) without freezing the browser
• Verifying the success of a "proxied" log in from an external application is now possible without relying on fragile internal knowledge
• Make the Theodul player zoom function more obvious using an overlay similar to the one in Google Maps
• Various player fixes related to tracks not having any tags
• Make searching for roles in the admin UI more robust by loading them all at once
• Improved compatibility with S3 compatibles/alternatives
• Display notifications as overlay instead of as "flash messages"
• The tag workflow operation now allows wildcards in the target flavor
• Use series ACL as default ACL for events in LTI upload tool if available

API changes

• The external API now returns the bibliographic start date instead of the technical one
• Allow updating processing information using the Events API
• Export statistics to CSV
• The filter in the Events API is "additive" now, allowing you to get different types of events in one request
• The Series API can now return ACLs within its response, if you tell it to

Additional Notes about 9.4

Besides many fixes and improvements, Opencast 9.4 comes with the following new features:

• The standalone video editor received an update, featuring optional metadata editing, hotkeys for the cutting controls and internationalization support.

Additional Notes about 9.3

Besides many fixes and improvements, Opencast 9.3 comes with the following new features:

• The metrics endpoint now provides information about the number of events per organization.
• A first beta version of the standalone video editor.

Additional Notes about 9.2

Opencast 9.2 comes with a few new features, non of which require any migrations or change the default bohavior of Opencast 9.x.

A metrics endpoint has been added. It supports the OpenMetrics format and can be used by tools like Prometheus. The endpoint is available at /metrics.

A completely new system for securing static file content has been integrated. While is is not active by default for compatibility to older 9.x releases, it can be easily enabled and used to ensure access to static files has the same security checks you are already used to from the player and from other user interfaces.

A new workflow operation cut-marks-to-smil has been added to allow a simpler specification of cutting information for the video editor. This was also the last piece missing from the BigBlueButton recordings integration in Opencast.

Some problems with the new adopter registration and update reporting have been resolved. If you stumbled over these before, this is the release to try again.

A security problem where chaning access ights to an individual video lead to cooresponding changes to its entire series was fixed.

Additional Notes about 9.1

This release contains an important bugfix where unprivileged users could not upload videos, before.

Release Schedule

Date	Phase
October 5th	Feature freeze
November 9th–November 15th	Translation week
November 16th–November 29th	Public QA phase
December 15th	Release of Opencast 9.0

Release managers

• Julian Kniephoff (ELAN e.V.)
• Carlos Turro Ribalta (Universitat Politècnica de València)