Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.8.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the August 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.8.0.

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

Flex 2020.8 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 (2020.9) is available. 
  • will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.12) is available. 

Kubernetes Support

In Flex 2020.8 we are introducing preliminary support for Kubernetes container orchestration. Both the Flex Stream Processor service and the File Processor Service can be deployed and managed by Kubernetes and can dynamically scale out to meet the load offered by current workflow and user operations. Other Flex services will be manageable by Kubernetes in future releases.

In this release we are providing support for AWS EKS and GCP GKE, Azure Kubernetes support will be added in a future release.

File Processor Service

The Flex File Processor Service is a new service that will be responsible for a number of media file operations. In this release the service supports the following job types for the FILE and S3 file system provider, support for AZURE and GCS file systems will be added in a future release:

  • Image sequence TAR
  • Image sequence un-TAR
  • Set file object tag

The following job types will be supported in future release:

  • Restore from cloud archive
  • Compute checksum
  • Move file
  • Copy file

The File Processor Service is designed for elasticity and will be capable of scaling up to meet demand when deployed in Kubernetes.

Package TAR Asset Plugin

A new JEF action plugin “Create Tar” is introduced in this release. When this action plugin is executed against any Image Sequence asset, it will create multiple TAR files (as per the plugin configuration) of dpx/exr/tif files. TAR files created by this plugin are tracked as a TAR Asset which is a new asset type added to Flex. This plugin also supports creating TARs from sub-set of dpx/exr/tif files. In this release TAR is only supported by the FILE and S3 file system provider; support for GCS and AZURE will be added in a later release.

Render Sequence JEF Plug-In

The FSP Transcode plugin now supports Flex Sequence assets as input. Flex Sequences can be rendered using supported media formats and persisted using the FILE, GCS, AZBS and S3 storage providers.

Metadata - Plugin Schema Registration

Flex JEF plugins can register required Metadata Definitions that a required by the plugin. For example, a “Video Analysis plugin” could use this feature to deploy a Metadata Definition that defines the data structure (e.g.: sentiment, Face recognition properties) that will be used to store the result. A job executing this plugin will create a Metadata Instance using the registered definition and populate the data as needed. JEF Plugin developers should use this feature to provide Metadata Definition to be deployed as part of their plugins to avoid the need for administrators to manually create or import metadata definitions.

Resolved Issues

  • Flex Enterprise – Updated the Azure Java SDK Library, to resolve an issue whereby Publish to YouTube failed for customers running on Azure.
  • Flex Reviewer Application – Fixed an issue with signed S3 URLs not working.
  • Flex Enterprise – Introduced support for file and folder names containing % character in Flex Enterprise, to resolve issue with AssetUpdate setFileDetails resulting in incorrect file path when containing “%”
  • Flex Publish Service – Enabled Sort By capability upon date fields in the Flex Publish Service FQL queries
  • Flex Login Application – Resolved an occasional issue whereby it was not possible to access Flex Enterprise (Core), Web Transfer (OoyalaMOVE) or Wizards, due to cookie-related issue, although the OoyalaMAM remained accessible.
  • Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved several issues and differences with the Flex Stream Processor when integrating the Flex Media Processing Engine with Avid upon Linux, compared to running on Windows.
  • Flex Stream Processor Service – It is now possible to clip assets with different encoding profiles and levels, such as baseline, main, and high profiles and levels 3, 3.1, 4, 4.1.
  • Flex Index Elastic Service – Introduced improvements to the indexing of Subtitle assets.

Known Issues

  • When importing DPX Image Sequence packages, if the Flex Stream Processor is not able to extract the technical metadata of any file within the package, the import job will fail. In the next release, asset-types not supported by Flex will be ignored, and it will be possible to remove corrupt or invalid files and retry the import.
  • Existing package import actions - Import AS02 and Import IMP will not work as there is a major configuration change. Now, these actions use Storage Resource to locate source file. Users must create new import actions. If user runs job using old action then the job will fail.

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