Ooyala is excited to present the April 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.4.0.
This release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform provides the new features, quality and security enhancements, bug fixes, and other changes listed below.
Flex 2020.4 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:
Access to assets can now be controlled by asset level ACLs to allow better control over which users have access to an individual asset. Prior to the 2020.4.0 release, access to assets was managed through workspaces, meaning that users with access to a workspace are granted access to all the assets belonging to the workspace. Whilst users can belong to multiple workspaces, assets can only belong to a single workspace, limiting the ability to give access to users who are not members of the workspace.
With asset level ACLs, individual users or user groups can be granted access to an asset, and access permissions are governed by roles assigned to the user or the user group.
The new Flex JWPlayer Publish and JWPlayer Unpublish actions provide genuine integration with JWPlayer in Flex. JWPlayer Publish supports configuring ‘Title’, ‘Description’, ‘Video tag’, ‘Schedule Video’, and ‘Custom Fields’. Media assets can be published by uploading from FILE Flex location or using signed URL for AZBS, GCS, S3 cloud storage providers.
Waveform locations are now configurable per account using Account Storage - Waveform folders and supports FILE, GCS, AZBS, and S3. The Waveform Extract plugin has been updated to use new location configuration.
FMPE supports reading location from Account Storage - Waveform folders, allowing waveform storage in a different location to the Proxy Storage.
An optional new feature toggle KV can be defined (flex/flex-jobasyncexecutor-service/waveformNewLocation
). This will store waveforms in <account-storage-waveform-location>/<assetUuid>/
which would provide better file organization specifically on large volumes of files. No migration is available yet to move existing waveform assets, this option should be used only on new installations.
In this release (ZXP version 1.0.14), the following new functionalities were introduced in the Adobe Premiere Panel:
Preview Flex assets (Proxy) in Adobe Premiere panel - this allows the editor to preview Flex content without the need to import it first.
Premiere Proxy Editing support – This allows editing of the Proxy media while using the high resolution media for the actual rendering operation. This requires the following prerequisites:
Support for HTTP Proxies have been added to support stricter security models which do not allow Flex services direct access to the Internet. The following Consul KVs can be set to enable request proxying:
flex/shared/networking/httpProxyHost
flex/shared/networking/httpProxyPort
flex/shared/networking/httpsProxyHost
flex/shared/networking/httpsProxyPort
flex/shared/networking/nonProxyHosts
The behaviour of resource polling under failure conditions has changed to improve operability. Previously, when a poll cycle failed (including all retries) the resource was set to a stopped state and its status set to failed. Manual intervention was required to restart the resource once the issue was resolved. Starting with the 2020.4.0 release, when a resource poll fails, the resource will remain in a started state and polling will continue normally, while the resource status is set to failed. When the issue is resolved, the next poll cycle will succeed and the resource status will be set to running. By continuing to poll the resource under failure conditions, there is no need for user input to restart the resource.
As planned for this release, MioCore has been deprecated. As a result, the following plugins are no longer available:
The following features and plugins have behaviour changes:
Configurations using any of the above items require in this version updating if they have been skipped in previous releases.
Several 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 |
---|---|---|
Delay Workflow | Use the corresponding JEF Delay Workflow action in future. Feature Toggle to allow continued use of legacy plugin: flex/shared/flex-enterprise/featureToggles/enableDeprecatedDelayWorkflowPlugin |
2020.6.0 |
In this release, we enabled Metadata persistence in Arango by default, it is essential to mark below feature toggle false in customer environment(s) who still like to use Metadata persistence in MySQL instead of Arango.
flex/shared/flex-enterprise/featureToggles/metadataArangoUsage
If customers are switching from MySQL to Arango, Dalet Ooyala will need to assist by testing the migration of existing data, prior to performing on Production systems. Please contact your Dalet Ooyala representative for further guidance.
Please contact your Dalet Ooyala representative for the full upgrade notes, further information about this release, and the complete list of resolved issues.