Panopto 11 On-Premises Release Notes (Oct 2021)

Meghal Patel

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 April 2021. 

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].

Updated Requirements

• SQL Server version — With this release, Panopto requires Microsoft SQL Server 2017 or higher. Note: We recommend applying the latest cumulative updates. 
• Panopto Mobile app — As a reminder, the legacy mobile apps are no longer supported on Panopto version 10 and higher. You can download the new Panopto Mobile app from the Apple app store or Google Play. Please note that the legacy app will be removed from the app store in April 2022.
• Internet Explorer 11 support — Starting with this release Panopto no longer supports Internet Explorer 11. And with the next on-premises release in April 2022, IE 11 will be blocked and users who attempt to access Panopto will be prompted to upgrade to a modern browser. Please refer to this help article for more information.

Headline Features

• Multi-stream mobile and embed viewer — Exciting changes are coming to mobile devices and the Panopto embed viewer.  Users will get a fully interactive multi-stream experience that allows them to dynamically control which streams are displayed and to cycle through visual layouts.  Linked Youtube videos are also now supported in this viewer, along with the full suite of features available in Panopto’s interactive desktop viewer
• Discussion Notifications — Users will receive email notifications if someone replies to their comments in a discussion thread. Additionally, video creators will receive email notifications when viewers comment on their videos. Users can choose to be notified immediately or receive a daily or weekly digest.
• Discussion Moderation — Content creators can moderate discussions for both live webcasts and on-demand videos, controlling which discussion comments are visible to the full audience of viewers.
• Moodle student video submissions — In response to usability feedback from users, we have improved the student video submission feature in the Moodle integration. Student submissions will now utilize a Moodle activity, allowing for a simple, familiar assignment workflow for both instructors and students.
• Multi-stream preview in Capture — After recording a video with Capture, users will now see all of their recorded streams in the preview viewer to increase confidence that all of their content has been captured correctly.

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

• Improved Sharing Experience — In response to usability feedback from users, we have revamped the sharing experience to be more intuitive and to use a modernized look and feel.
• Table of Contents and Transcripts in share emails — When sharing videos, users can choose to include the table of contents and transcript in the notification email, allowing the recipients to search or “read” the video without leaving their email inbox.
• Multi-language Search — Users can specify the content language for each folder, enabling Panopto’s Smart Search and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) processing in multiple languages within the same site. This requires additional installation of ASR engines for all supported languages and increased disk space on the ASR host.
• Join or resume a session using Capture — Users can now use Capture to create distributed recordings, joining an in-progress recording or resuming a previous recording, right from the video library. 
• Improved clips ordering — Users can now drag and drop clips to the desired location from the timeline UI in the editor.
• Mobile apps: Background/Reliable Upload & Share — Panopto’s mobile app now allows users to create recordings of unlimited duration and will upload videos while the app is in the background.  Users can also easily share videos from within the app. (Please note the new Panopto mobile app is only supported on Panopto 10.0 or higher versions.)

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 a future release. Please give these features a try and let us know what you think.

• Remote Recorder linking (beta) — For cases where a room or venue is covered by two Remote Recorders, users can now link the recorders together. When Remote Recorders are linked, all ad-hoc and scheduled recordings for either recorder will always cause both linked clients to record. Note: This feature is currently in beta and is off by default. To enable this feature on your Panopto site, set the site setting “Remote Recorder - Linked Remote Recorders” to "True" to enable it. Please see: How to Link Two Remote Recorders Together (Beta)
• Playlist Analytics Dashboard (beta) — We have added a new analytics dashboard, that shows the aggregated views, downloads, and unique users for a particular playlist. It also shows the breakdown of viewing analytics of individual videos within the playlist. This feature is off by default, and can be turned on with “Features - Analytics - Playlist Stats Enabled (beta)”.
• Tags Analytics Dashboard (beta) — We have added two new analytics dashboards related to Tags. The main dashboard shows a list of most popular Tags by views & downloads or minutes delivered or unique users. For each tag, there is a dashboard  showing the number of  views & downloads, minutes delivered, and unique users for a particular playlist. This can be accessed from the more menu for a tag in the System > Tags view. This feature is off by default, and can be turned on with “Features - Analytics - Tags Stats Enabled (beta)".

Behavior and Settings changes

The following settings have been added in this release:

• “Features - Viewer - Discussion Moderation” — This site-level setting controls the default behavior of the new discussion moderation feature. It has three options:
  • Disabled - all moderation related features are disabled. 
  • (default) Comments public by default - New comments will be visible to everyone who has access to the video. Users can still opt to post comments privately.
  • Comments private by default - New comments and their replies are only available to users posting the comment or moderators. Moderators can choose to make it public.
• “Features - Discussion Email Notifications” — The discussion email notifications can be controlled by Panopto administrators via the setting 'Features - Discussion Email Notifications'. The setting can be set to one of the following values:
  • Users may opt in (default): Discussion notifications are enabled on the site, but not applied to users. Users can adjust their notification settings by following the steps in How to Use Discussion Notifications. 
  • Daily digest - All users receive a daily digest of the discussion notification emails.
  • Weekly digest - All users receive a weekly digest of the discussion notification emails.
  • Disabled - Discussion notifications are disabled for the site. Users will not see the option for notifications.

Please note:  If the site setting mode is changed, any preference set by individual users will not be overwritten. For example, if a user sets their preference to a weekly digest while the site setting was set to Users may opt-in and then an administrator changes the site setting to Daily digest, it will not change the user's choice.

• “Enable multi-language for automatic captioning and smart features” — This feature is ready for production use. This setting allows administrators or creators to specify the language for automatic captioning, smart search, and smart chapters, at the folder level. By default it will be disabled and administrators can turn this on for their sites.
• “Integrations - Quizzes - Block Viewing Sessions With Graded Assignments Outside of an LMS” — This site setting warns or blocks viewers from viewing sessions with graded assignments if the video has been loaded outside of the LMS. By default the setting is set to warn users, but administrators can change it to block or even turn this setting off if they don’t want to warn or block their users. 
• “Enable Record and Upload in the new Mobile app” — This site setting should be used to turn on the ability to record and upload videos in the new mobile app. Important Note: For this feature to function correctly, http/2 needs to be disabled on the web server.
• “Features - Analytics - Playlist Stats Enabled (beta)” —  This site setting should be used to turn on the Playlist analytics dashboard. This is off by default.
• "Features - Analytics - Tag Stats Enabled (beta)”  —  This site setting should be used to turn on the Tags analytics dashboard. This is off by default.
• “Remote Recorder - Linked Remote Recorders (beta) — This site settings should be used to turn on Linked Remote Recorders. 

The following settings have changed in this release:

• “Captioning - Enable Automatic Machine Captioning Provider” — Starting this release, this site-setting is available to all customers. It can be used to control whether Automatic Machine Captions is available as a captions provider.
• “HTTP Strict Transport Security” — Starting this release, this site setting will be enabled for all sites, unless it was explicitly disabled for your site. Note: This site setting cannot be changed by administrators, please contact Panopto support if you have any questions.
• “Limit Cross Origin API Requests to known origins” — Browser based cross-origin requests to the Panopto SOAP and REST APIs are now blocked by default from unknown origins. Origins that should be allowed to make requests to the Panopto APIs can be specified in the  “Allowed Public API Origins” setting.

For other minor improvements and bug fixes in this release, please check out our June 2021 cloud update release notes and release notes for our bi-weekly cloud updates from June 29th, 2021 to October 10th, 2021. Please note, some features mentioned in the forums may not apply to on-premises versions.