Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.1.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the January 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.1.0.

This release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform provides the new features, quality and security enhancements, bug fixes, and other changes listed below.

Flex 2020.1 is an interim release track, allowing customers to make use of the latest functionality and bug fixes in Flex before the next LTS (Long Term Supported) release track becomes available.

As an interim release track, it should be noted that this:

  • will only receive security updates once the next track (2020.2) is available.
  • will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.6) is available.

Performance and reliability

The scheduling of repeating tasks (such as wait actions or resource polling) has been improved by segregating platform and workflow jobs. As a result, on systems that have a high number of scheduled jobs, overall throughput and performance of polling operations has been significantly improved.

Multi-site

Collections created and managed via the OoyalaMAM application are supported in a multi-site scenario.

SAML authentication

Administrators are able to directly configure IDP metadata in the Flex Enterprise UI in addition to the existing method of fetching metadata dynamically via a URL supplied by the IDP. This simplifies overall configuration by removing the need to have valid SSL certificates installed on the system.

Web Transfer App

Instrumentation of the Web Transfer application has been improved in increase observability via application level metrics. In this release, the Web Transfer App has improved memory and concurrency management increasing the stability of the application

Rest API

A new property FlexAssetType has been added to the result payload of /assets/{id}. This will allow applications consuming the endpoint to determine the returned asset type explicitly. Previously, additional logic was required to determine the asset type based on other properties present in the result payload.

Integrations

Ooyala Flex has been tested and certified against Interra Baton v7.6.

flexctl (beta)

A command line tool that simplifies common administrative tasks performed by operations and support staff is being made available as a beta release.

flexctl provides the following functionality:

  • Simplified connecting to various database backends for introspection purposes
  • Adding users and setting passwords
  • Safely failing stuck / cancelled jobs (incl. releasing locks)
  • Inspecting and removal of held locks
  • Creating an infrastructure level summary of the environment

Plugin Deprecations

A number of Ooyala Flex Enterprise core plugins are being deprecated. In most cases, new JEF-based plugins have been developed to replace them, or there are existing alternatives.

These plugins will still be available on Ooyala Flex for a limited number of releases, by specifically enabling them with environment feature toggles. Existing configurations should be reviewed and migrated as soon as possible.

Plugin Notes Target removal release
Extract Technical Metadata Action Use the (JEF) Extract Technical Metadata action instead. The deprecated version may cause memory issues and instability. 2020.3.0
Default Extract Action FSP based metadata extraction is preferred. The deprecated version may cause memory issues and instability. 2020.3.0
Create Proxy Action Use the Create Proxy (FSP) action 2020.6.0
Multiple Profile Create Proxy Action Not used in practice and therefore retired. 2020.6.0
Publish to Brightcove FTP Action Use the corresponding JEF Brightcove publishing action, which targets the latest Brightcove APIs. 2020.2.0
Publish to Brightcove HTTP Action Use the corresponding JEF Brightcove publishing action, which targets the latest Brightcove APIs. 2020.2.0
UnPublish from Brightcove FTP Action Use the corresponding JEF Brightcove publishing action, which targets the latest Brightcove APIs. 2020.2.0
Groovy Script Executor (Event Handler) Use a Job Executor event handler to launch a Groovy Script Action 2020.3.0

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed an issue within the REST API which caused the master keyframes in the Operations Dashboard to appear as broken links.
  • Fixed an issue within the Flex Stream Processor which resulted in Proxy Action failures due to a Divide-by-Zero error when processing HEVC iPhone media files with a Pixel Aspect Ratio defined as ‘-1:0’.
  • PATCH Method introduced for the oAuth Message Action, as required for the Brightcove API to update metadata.
  • Fixed an issue where some objects variables were being serialised in the workflow context, blocking the Brightcove JEF Publish Plug-In from being used in a workflow.
  • Fixed an issue where if a Tag did not already exist in a given Tag collection, it could not be directly added to an Asset’s metadata and resulted in an exception.
  • Fixed an issue where the error “Import support for the given plugin no longer supported!” appears when attempting to import metadata or workflow definitions.
  • Fixed an issue where the wrong Job configurations were sent in an action post call, resulting in the Extract Tiled Keyframe Action to fail when run from the Flex MAM application.
  • Fixed an issue where searches in the Flex MAM application, which contained either a forward ‘/’ or back-slash ‘\’, would result in a 400-status error.

Please contact your Ooyala representative for the full upgrade notes, further information about this release, and the complete list of resolved issues.