Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.2.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the February 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.2.0.

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

Flex 2020.2.0 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 (2020.3) is available.
  • will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.6) is available.

Event Handler Microservice

This release includes a new Event Handler microservice. In future this service will be responsible for all event handler operation, to improve overall scalability of the Flex platform. In this release, it is an optional service, only required for customers wanting to make use of the alpha version of the Business Intelligence event handler.

The Business Intelligence event handler allows Flex events to be piped into ElasticSearch (either the internal Flex cluster, the monitoring instance that forms part of the ELK stack, or an external ES instance or cluster).

Multi-site

  • Replication of Collection, clip-range types, and sequences are now supported in a multi-site scenario.
  • Event messaging has been improved for replication conflict resolution.
  • The Video Proxy Service has been updated to resolve the asset’s location in Storage Resource from Folder Resource using the configured storage Selector Policy.

Improvements to Brightcove Publish Action Plugin

This release includes the ability to republish assets with the Brightcove plug-in, support for removing items from a Brightcove Playlist when performing an unpublish, plus stability improvements.

Improvements to Metadata Merge for ArangoDB

In this release there have been several improvements to the Metadata Merge service, increasing the stability and reliability of metadata merge operations when metadata is stored in ArangoDB.

Improved support for Microsoft Azure AD

Further to the support for static IDP metadata introduced in Flex 2020.1.0, this Flex release removes the Scoping and ProxyCount attributes from SAML requests, which are not supported by Azure AD and Microsoft ADFS.

Ability to add User Groups to Workspace Membership

This release includes the ability to add user groups to a workspace, with their permissions dynamically updated as users are added or removed from the groups. Using the Enterprise user interface, it is possible to add and remove User Groups to workspaces, and a new REST API endpoint has been introduced to retrieve the groups assigned to a given workspace:

  • GET - /api/workspaces/<workspace-id>/groupMembers
  • PUT - /api/workspaces/<workspace-id>/members

This simplifies the management of user access to Workspaces allowing administrators better control on who has access to a workspace.

Changes to object visibility

In this release, changes have been applied across Flex, to enable objects created in account or master account to be available in global search.

How visibility works - it works upward and downward accounts hierarchy:

  • Flex objects created in Master Account and visibility given to AccountA, then all users of AccountA and sub accounts of AccountA will be able to see objects.
  • Flex objects created in Master Account and visibility given to Sub Account A, then still all users of AccountA and Sub Account A will be able to see objects, but not other sub accounts of AccountA.
  • Flex objects created in AccountA and visibility given to AccountA then all users of AccountA and sub accounts of AccountA will be able to see objects.

Transcode FSP support

Flex 2020.2 introduces a new JEF plugin to support existing features and new functionality: Transcode (FSP) version 2.0.x

The new Transcode (FSP) plug-in will supersede the support of “Enterprise Transcode” and “Enterprise Multiple Profile Transcode” Actions when they are configured with a Flex Media Profile using “Flex Stream Processor” as Transcode Engine only.

Plugin Deprecations

A number of 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 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 Resource Use the (JEF) Extract Technical Metadata action to Extract Technical Metadata and stop using this Resource. 2020.3.0
Default Inject Action N/A 2020.3.0

Plugin Changes

Plugins listed below were extracting technical metadata of an asset using mio core. As part of this release, now these plugins will no longer extract technical metadata by default.

Plugin Behaviour Migration Advice
Asset Import Action Import will no longer Extract Technical Metadata as part of the Import job. If this action configuration parameter is selected to request Extract Technical Metadata, the job will fail with a deprecation message. Use the (JEF) Extract Technical Metadata action to Extract Technical Metadata after the asset is imported.
Multi-Asset Import Action Import will no longer Extract Technical Metadata as part of the Import job. If this action configuration parameter is selected to request Extract Technical Metadata, the job will fail with a deprecation message. Use the (JEF) Extract Technical Metadata action to Extract Technical Metadata after the assets are imported.
Asset Folder Import Action Import will no longer Extract Technical Metadata as part of the Import job. This action doesn’t have a configuration parameter to enable/disable Extract Technical Metadata as part of the Import job. The job will not fail but it will publish a warning event message indicating that technical metadata has not been extracted. Get ready for the next release to use the (JEF) Extract Technical Metadata action to Extract Technical Metadata after the assets are imported.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed an issue where different metadata could not be defined for assets in the Web Transfer bulk upload or updated in the Flex MAM bulk metadata editor.
  • Fixed an issue whereby subtitle extraction would fail with an ‘IndexOutOfBound’ error when the subtitle file contained ancillary data packets that did not confirm to the OP-47 standard. The extractor now tests the DID and SDID values and rejects packets that do not signal an OP-47 payload (DID = 0x43h, SDID = 0x02h).
  • Fixed an issue that blocked adding a Tag in an Asset’s metadata if the Tag did not exist in Tag collection or was added via scripting.
  • Fixed an issue whereby if the Consul keys available for the Flex Stream Processor were configured, it would not process jobs.
  • Fixed an issue that when multiple Flex Stream Processor instances are available, only the instance that posted the job via its API would process the job. Now any FSP instances will process jobs.
  • Fixed an issue whereby expired S3 credentials were used in FSP jobs.
  • Resolved an issue whereby publishing to Brightcove using the new JEF Brightcove Publish Action plug-in would result in occasional random failures.
  • Fixed an issue whereby it was not possible to Unpublish from any User Interface, including Flex Enterprise, Flex MAM Application or OoyalaMAM, when using the new JEF Brightcove Publish Action plug-in.
  • Fixed an issue whereby orphaned metadata instances in ArangoDB would cause the metadata merge to fail. Now orphaned metadata instances are detected and deleted automatically.
  • Fixed an issue whereby simultaneous metadata merges on a metadata definition would cause the metadata merge to fail when using Arango DB.
  • Fixed an issue whereby it was not possible to delete sub-directories of Segmented Assets from Google Cloud Storage (GCS).
  • Fixed issues whereby new users authenticated using LDAP were not able to login. Administrators must ensure when creating users in an LDAP directory, that the following fields are populated, as these are mandatory to register with Flex Enterprise: First Name, Last Name and Email.
  • Fixed an issue in the Flex Enterprise User Interface whereby checkbox elements were rendered as raw HTML in the Advanced Search options.

Known Issues

Please be aware the DB migration script V1569389947_alter_table_set_auto_increment_column.sql can take an extended period of time to run in environments with large data sets.

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