Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.9.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the October 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.10.0.

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

Flex 2020.10 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 release: 

  • will only receive security updates once the next track (2020.11) is available. 
  • will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.12) is available. 

Collection Item Ordering

The order of items in collections is now deterministic, with new items always added to the end. The order can be manually curated by dragging-and-dropping items into the desired sequence.

Collection Variants & Metadata

Added support for associating variants and metadata to Collections. This means you can create a variant for “Collection” object type in Metadata Designer, and in the Flex Media Platform, in the Create Collection page, you can select the configured Variant to associate with your collection. The default Metadata configured for the Variant will be associated with the Collection. The tab for Metadata will be displayed where you can view/edit metadata of the Collection.

Prerequisite: You must configure A default variant and default metadata definition.

Known Issues:

  • Two Variants with same default metadata definition is not supported
  • Metadata definitions with mandatory fields are not supported

IMF Text and Data Track Support

Additional support for MXF MediaAsset with Text and/or Data stream has been added across Flex Enterprise and Plugins in this release: IMP Import, Extract Technical Metadata and Flex Enterprise REST & API. IMP Import plugin captures both Composition sequence of Text (subtitle tracks) as well the CPL segment data markers. The latter is stored as Media Asset Dynamic Technical Metadata (ArangoDB) and available as json response using the MediaAsset (MXF) REST and API.

Event Handler Service

The Event Handler Service is now a standard product component and provides microservice-based equivalents to all existing Event Handler plugins. The legacy Enterprise-based event handlers will be marked as deprecated in the next release and are scheduled for removal from the product in the 2020.12.0 LTS release.

At present the new plugins have a “V2” suffix to their name, but this will be removed when the legacy plugins are no longer provided.

JW Player Geo-Restriction and Secrets Service

JWPlayer Publish plugin supports now a more secure configuration option to store in Flex the JWPlayer apiKey and apiPassword parameters. Using Flex Enterprise a Flex Secret can be created using the new Enterprise REST and API methods at workflow or plugin configuration time. This Flex Secret can be used in JWPlayer Publish to resolve dynamically at run-time JWPlayer credentials

Geo-restriction information can be configured from Flex JWPlayer Publish plugin. The following options are available: 1) list of countries to allow playback, 2) countries to deny playback, 3) JWPlayer Geo-blocking rule name.

Resolved Issues

  • Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby it was not possible to edit and save metadata with more than 1,000 line items.
  • Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby it was not possible to purge and delete items that no longer existed in storage.
  • Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby Show and Season Search in Flex Enterprise using the main search bar would cause pagination of search results to produce unexpected results.
  • Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby expression feature not evaluating for any Action.
  • Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby large package imports would fail part-way through import.
  • Flex Enterprise – Enhanced and tested support for S3-Compatible Dell ECS S3 storage.
  • Flex REST API – Based on request to filter out object referred in metadata is deleted or not, a flag has been introduced in the API response that indicates whether the object is deleted or not.
  • Flex REST API – Resolved an issue whereby inconsistent content type responses would be received depending upon whether the target object existed.
  • Flex Data Aggregation Service – Refactored to address issues which produced negative counting visible in the Flex Enterprise Job Summary panel.
  • Flex Metadata Merge Service – Resolved an issue whereby some jobs with objectId=0 failed to progress from queued state.
  • Flex Stream Processor Service - Updated to ensure order of input and output streams is not lost when performing stitch or sequence.
  • Flex Stream Processor Service – Fixed an issue whereby the asset duration was incorrect for AS02 package proxy assets.
  • Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby AS02 and IMP proxy creation would fail, due to transcoding to empty path on object storage placing output in incorrect path.
  • Flex JEF Plugins – Introduced support for the JW Player Publish Action to use the Secret Service.

Known Issues

When trying to edit account variant from Flex Enterprise, it opens the Metadata Designer Application screen without showing the selected account variant (FLEX-58473).

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