Panopto 10 On-Premises Release notes (April 2021)

Meghal Patel

Panopto 10 On-Premises Release

This release contains many of the new features and improvements that have been released to Panopto’s cloud environments since the previous on-premises release in Nov 2020. 

To schedule an upgrade for the new release, please contact Panopto Support online at support.panopto.com. You can also email us at [email protected].

Headline Features

• Tags — Panopto’s video library has a new way to support content organization and discovery: #tags.  Content creators and administrators can now apply tags to their videos from the video settings, the editor, or in Panopto Capture after recording new videos.

• From the library and the viewer interfaces, users can see the tags applied to each video and find other tagged videos with a single click. 

Administrators will be able to manage tags for their site including the ability to add, remove, or merge tags.

To learn more, please visit How to Use Tags. 

• Subscriptions — Users can now subscribe to content owners, tags, as well as specific folders. This allows them to curate content they care about the most. Once a user starts following a person, tag, or folder, any videos associated with the subscribed entity will show up on their homepage. A user can manage all their subscriptions from the subscriptions page or from their ‘User Settings’. 

• Smart Chapters — Panopto’s innovative Smart Chapters feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate a table of contents for any video with a screen capture, including recordings from Capture. Smart Chapters can be controlled at the site or at the folder level.  

Please see  "How to Enable Smart Chapters" and  "How to Use Smart Chapters" for more information.

• Canvas Embed Workflow — Great news for Canvas customers!  We’ve documented a workflow to make the Panopto button available in the Canvas WYSIWYG editor. To learn more, please visit How to Set Up the Canvas Integration: Enable the Panopto Button. 

• Moodle student video submissions — Students can submit video assignments from within the Moodle interface. Find out how in our support article.
• Delete Streams in the Editor — Users can now delete or replace video streams from within the video editor. To learn the key benefits on this new functionality, please visit our article, How to Delete Streams in the Editor. 
• Share interesting points in a video — Viewers can easily share a link to a specific place in the video with other viewers, right from the viewer. As long as the other user has permissions to the video, they will be taken to the exact spot in the video that was shared with them. If the other user doesn't have permissions they will see the 'Request Access' page.
• RTMP Live-Captioning — Users watching a live event broadcasting over RTMP can now see live captions for any RTMP stream containing CEA-608 or CEA-708 style captions. Once the broadcast is over, these captions will be imported into Panopto. How to Use RTMP Live Captioning

Beta Features

Additionally, we have a couple of new features available for beta testing. These features are not yet ready for production use, but your feedback will help us refine them for release later this year. Please give these features a try and let us know what you think.

• Panopto Capture Virtual Background (beta)  — Users can now make their videos look even more polished by choosing a virtual background for their videos recorded in Capture. Users will be able to blur their background or use a default image or self-uploaded images as background.

Site and department administrators can upload a default background image for their site and department, respectively. For site default, please go to System → Brand Customization and for departments, you can find this under the ‘Branding’ tab for a department.

Please note: Panopto Capture overall continues to be in beta for on-premises customers. 

Settings & Behavior updates

The following settings have been added in this release:

• Enable Video Tags — This setting controls the availability of the Tags functionality on your site. This setting is ON by default, and can be turned OFF if Tags functionality is not needed. This setting has ‘IncludeInPhoneHomePayload’ enabled on it, which enables Panopto in understanding which customers have this feature turned on.
• Enable Subscriptions  — This setting controls the availability of the subscriptions feature. This setting has ‘IncludeInPhoneHomePayload’ enabled on it, which enables Panopto in understanding which customers have this feature turned on.
• Enable Smart Chapters — “Enable Smart Chapters” has three choices to control the site-wide option for Smart Chapters:
• Don’t generate table of contents — Smart Chapters will not be generated for new videos
• Available-on Demand (default) — Smart Chapters are generated for new videos but video owners need to toggle them in the editor.
• “Automatically add to my videos — Smart Chapters are generated and shown by default when available.
• Enable link sharing button for non-creator viewers of a video — This site setting controls whether non-creators see the “share” button in Panopto players. By default, this setting is ON allowing non-creators to easily share a link to a specific point in the video.
• RTMP Closed Caption Import — This setting controls whether live captions available in a RTMP live broadcast are imported into the on-demand version of the webcast in Panopto. This setting is OFF by default. 
• Display Video Owner in the Viewer — This new site setting controls whether the new ‘Details’ tab in the viewer and editor, shows the ‘Created By’ user name. If the Subscriptions feature is turned on, it also allows viewers to subscribe to the user by hovering on the name. This setting is ON by default, please contact Panopto Support if you wish to disable this.
• Disable Capture Virtual Background (beta) — The Capture Virtual Background feature will be in beta and OFF by default. This site setting controls whether the background blur or background replacement feature is available in Panopto Capture.

The following settings have changed in this release:

• Enable Capture for recording from the Embedded Video Selector(beta) — This setting controls whether Panopto Capture is available in the embedded video selector. Starting this release, this setting is ON by default. Please note, if Capture is turned off site-wide (using “Enable Panopto Capture” setting), then Capture will not show up in the Embedded Video Selector regardless of the ‘Enabled Capture for recording from the Embedded Video Selector’ site-setting state. Along with other Capture features, this feature is also considered to be in beta.

For other minor improvements and bug fixes in this release, please check out our Dec 2020 cloud update release notes and release notes for our bi-weekly cloud updates from Sept. 23rd, 2020 to March 24th, 2021.

Updated Requirements

• SQL Server version — Only Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (latest SP) or higher is supported for Panopto version 10 or higher. Please note, starting next release (Oct 2021), we will block versions Microsoft SQL Server 2016 or lower. Note: We recommend applying the latest cumulative updates. 
• Windows Server version — Starting this release (April 2021), Windows Server 2016 or higher will be required to install Panopto server. Windows Server 2012 R2 will no longer be supported.
• Panopto Mobile app — Starting with Panopto 10, the legacy mobile apps will no longer be supported. Please download the new Panopto Mobile app from the Apple app store or Google Play. Please note, the legacy apps will be blocked starting Oct 2021 release.
• Internet Explorer 11 support — Panopto will block and no longer support Internet Explorer 11 starting in the Oct 2021 on-premises release. Please refer to this help article for more information.