6.0 Release Notes

Dave Hannan

Originally posted November 27, 2018 at 9:04 AM

Headline features

• New analytics interface - Improved visualizations for usage analytics make it easier to derive insights about your users’ engagement with Panopto video. At the system level you can instantly see folder usage roll-ups to understand which departments are utilizing Panopto the most. Updated visualizations for individual folders make it easier for instructors to gain insights about which videos are most popular and which users are viewing the most. New interaction heat-maps for individual videos highlight when and where viewers are engaging the most by visualizing where, in the video timeline, viewers are watching, taking notes, and commenting on the video. There are also two new downloadable usage reports to allow deeper analysis of remote recorder usage and viewing across the whole of your Panopto site.
• Upgraded site navigation and UX Refresh - A refreshed user experience improves browsing and navigation of your Panopto site. The primary navigational controls have been made collapsible and resizable, allowing users to tune the interface to work best for their specific tasks. The updated interface features lighter colors, consistent iconography, and a consistent treatment for all action buttons, reducing user confusion and reducing the cost of training new users on Panopto.
• Moodle folder structure mirroring - Customers utilizing the Moodle integration will be able to mirror the ‘Category’ structure within their Moodle installation into Panopto as a hierarchical folder structure to provide a better organization of course folders. (Note: this feature requires an updated Moodle plugin, which will soon be available in beta.)
• Network Access Rules - Admins can now lock down viewing and editing to allow only users within specific networks, by specifying a range of allowable IP addresses. This can be specified across the whole of the site, for specific folders, or for specific videos.
• Recycle Bin - Admin users can now see recently deleted videos in a system-level Recycle Bin. Videos in the recycle bin can be restored or permanently deleted with a single click.

Behavior changes and new features

Settings updates

The following settings have changed in this release.

• Allow unedited caption download -- This new setting controls whether a complete caption file is made available for download on the ‘Captions’ modal page for sessions. It may be useful for customers using manual workflows for captioning.
• Display session age in list views -- This new setting controls whether the age of sessions is displayed in the VCMS list interfaces.
• Enable suggesting new users -- This new setting controls whether new users within external identity systems are suggested when sharing sessions and folders.
• Index Presenter Notes -- This new setting controls whether presenter notes within Powerpoint slides will be indexed by Panopto search. Note that verbatim versions of those notes are never be shown to end users.
• Remote Recorder Low Disk Space: Notifications Enabled and Remote Recorder Low Disk Space: Minimum -- These new settings can disable or alter the minimum allowed free disk space on remote recorder machines before notification emails will be sent.

Analytics

• Updated the UI for viewing analytics across the VCMS interface, for system, folders, and sessions. Analytics data is now displayed in a full-page view with updated visualizations and new capabilities.
• The updated visualizations make it easier to answer common questions around viewing usage, in terms of view count, minutes delivered, and unique viewers.
• For system and folder dashboards, we have also added a sub-folder breakdown chart. This allows you to see a breakdown by folder as well as an over-time trend for the sub-folders.
• For sessions, we added a new heatmap highlighting when views, notes, and discussions occur during the video.
• We have added a new scheduled report for individual video views for the entire site.
• We have added additional information to the usage reports:
  • Session ID has been added to system views report
  • Folder Path has been added to Remote Recorder (RR) usage report

VCMS

• We have updated the user experience across the entire site, to make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate
  • Users can now choose to collapse the left navigation bar and focus on the video content.
  • The UI has been updated to use consistent styling of UI elements including iconography, fonts, button styles.
• Introduced a new resizable tray for folder browsing and system settings.
  • The new browsing tray provides a better experience for exploring long lists of folders since it consumes the full height of the page, and it can be resized horizontally to allow users to see long folder names and deeper folder trees.
  • The System menu is now ordered alphabetically and also takes advantage of the full height of the tray.
  • The tray can be pinned by the user if their workflow needs frequent access to the folder hierarchy, or it can be allowed to auto-hide.
  • The drag and drop behavior for sessions has been updated to work well with the modified browse experience by automatically expanding when a drag-over begins. The UI displayed during a multi-select drag operation has also been improved to make it clearer when multiple items are being dragged.
  • When enabled, admins can lock down viewing and editing to allow only users within specific networks, by specifying a range of allowable IP addresses. This can be specified across the whole of the site, for specific folders, or for specific videos.
• Recycle bin
• Network Access Rules
  • IP-allowlist filtering can be enabled on your site via the site setting ‘EnableNetworkAccessRules’.
  • Admin users can see recently deleted videos in a system-level Recycle Bin. Videos in the recycle bin can be restored or permanently deleted with a single click.
• Updated "Edit this page" button color on Home page for administrators.
• Fixed multiple issues with editing playlists of more than 50 sessions.

Captioning

• Added the option for 'edited' sessions to be sent for captioning. When enabled, if a session was recorded for 60 minutes and edited in Panopto to a duration of just 15 minutes, then sending that session for captioning will now result in only 15 minutes of captioning, not 60 minutes for the total duration of the recording.

Device support

• Added support for the Matrox Maevex 6020 Remote Recorder (press release)

Bug fixes and minor changes

Analytics

• Added the session’s folder path to the downloadable remote recorder usage report.
• Added the sessionId to the folder views download, allowing for easier cross-referencing of data.
• Added a new downloadable report, System views, that shows information about each view across in the entire system.
• Fixed an estimation accuracy problem for audio podcasts streamed through third-party clients that resulted in under-counting viewing duration.
• Added a new detailed user usage API endpoint with additional details and the ability to specify a date range.
• Updated analytics dashboards report time ranges to match the user's browser time zone.

VCMS

• Added a setting, EnableGetUserSuggestions, that turns off the ability to create new suggested users while sharing folders and sessions.
• Added a new setting, "Copied sessions retain viewer permissions", that keeps the existing behavior where viewer permissions are copied when copying a session. When set to 'False' it allows the copied session to exclusively inherit parent folder permissions instead of also retaining the original session permissions.
• Fixed an issue in the Share page where pasting in a large number of email addresses failed to correctly identify and resolve specific users.
• Updated user autocomplete behavior in Share UI, to pick the first search result if user hits tab instead of waiting for autocomplete suggestions to show.
• Added the ability to filter the processing page by a custom date range, in addition to preset ranges.
• Improved the keyboard accessibility of the "Create a new folder" modal page.
• Fixed a minor security issue that allowed non-SSL pages to embed secure Panopto pages by modifying the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.
• Fixed an issue that allowed modal windows to close without warning about unsaved changes.
• Fixed an issue where closing the remote recorder modal window while saving changes displayed a misleading message.
• Fixed an issue where caption upload allowed unsupported files.
• Updated the design of buttons throughout the Panopto website.
• Changed the System settings list to be sorted alphabetically.
• Updated all system emails sent to non-admin users to be sent in html format.
• Fixed an issue where deleting an assignment folder and creating a new one caused the deleted assignment folder to be irrecoverable. Note: If the deleted assignment folder is restored and the parent folder has a new active assignment folder, the assignment folder will be restored as a closed folder.
• Added an option to disable discussions for specific folders.
• Updated the image displayed when no session preview image has been computed.
• Added clearer drag preview images for moving folders or sessions using drag and drop.

Embed Viewer

• Updated the viewer and embed viewer player components to new version of flowplayer and hlsjs.

Interactive Viewer

• Fixed an issue where the viewer could hang in certain situations.
• Fixed an issue in the viewer where quizzes would display at the wrong time when the session also has a clip placed at the beginning, and the clip has been partially cut.
• Added a setting, Minimize Interactive Viewer Header, that hides the Help and Sign In controls in the header of the interactive viewer for anonymous users.
• Fixed an issue in the viewer where certain sessions had grey bars on the sides.
• Fixed an issue where autoplay disabled message didn't move correctly when left pane was expanded.
• Fixed an issue where session title was truncated even when there is enough space to display it.
• Fixed an issue where captions were not displayed correctly in fullscreen mode.
• Fixed numerous screen reader accessibility issues with quizzes displayed in the interactive viewer.
• Updated the viewer and embed viewer player components to new version of flowplayer and hlsjs.
• Fixed an issue where certain MP4 sessions didn't play correctly in some versions of Safari, and on mobile.

Editor

• Moved the ‘Set preview image’ button from the right side of the timeline toolbar to the left, near the other timeline action buttons, like ‘Cut’ and ‘Add content’.
• Fixed an issue in the editor that allowed cut boundary to go beyond the session boundaries.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where cut handles for all cuts were incorrectly highlighted when dragging a cut bound.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where changes made with the focus tool caused the viewer to seek.
• Updated the editor to only snap cut bounds to the playhead, not to the bounds of other cuts.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where multiple clips at the same position weren't displayed in the right order.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where lines flashed at the start and end of the timeline when clicking.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where the button that rewinds 10 seconds didn't skip cut time when previewing cuts.
• Updated the design of the timeline view and controls in the editor.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where the stream preview remained disabled incorrectly in certain situations.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where it would resume from the last viewer playback position.
• Fixed an issue in the editor when there were overlapping primary streams where the wrong stream was given default precedence.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where dragging a cut bound out of the target streams displayed misleading cuts.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where streams didn't display in order of their start time.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where tools weren't properly disabled during a clip.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where refreshing the page when uploading a stream prevented the session from getting published.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where stream upload was incorrectly allowed during a clip.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where a uniform, low audio level displayed in the audio histogram as if the audio level was high.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where sessions with multiple clips could display them in the wrong order.
• Fixed an issue in the editor with moving clips to the end of the timeline.
• Fixed an issue in the editor where a cut boundary handle was only available on one side.
• Fixed an issue to improve the ability to make precision cuts in the editor while dragging by changing snap points and time displays.

Media Processing

• Fixed an issue where, in very rare cases, the duration of extremely short videos could be calculated to be considerably longer.
• Reduced the amount of time it takes for media packaging.
• Added capability to "Manage registration keys" on the Remote Recorder page, for managing registration keys used for remote recorders.

Core Services

• Expanded the audit log to include create, update and delete operations with the session and folder public api endpoints.
• Expanded the audit log to include availability windows, network access rules, folder permissions, scheduled recordings, and the deletion of remote recorders.
• Fixed an issue where video uploads from the web or API could fail processing and not automatically retry under rare circumstances.

Integrations

• Customer preview: Added a new integration with Blackboard Ultra, with support for SSO, LTI embedding, and automatic course provisioning.
• Added an option to the Moodle integration to support mirroring the hierarchy of Moodle Categories into Panopto folders. (Note: this requires an updated Moodle plugin, which will soon be available in beta.)
• Fixed an issue with the Canvas integration where the Panopto embedding tool did not work in Canvas group discussions.
• Added an option to the Canvas integration to create top-level folders for each sub-account when mirroring Canvas hierarchy into Panopto folders.
• In the Canvas integration, updated the default LTI link name to 'Panopto Video'.
• Fixed an issue where Canvas Hierarchy mirroring did not work correctly if account and course shared the same ID.
• Fixed an issue with the Blackboard integration where it previously required a manual settings change to allow LTI to identify users via the custom_blackboard_user_id field.

Public APIs

• Added support for PDF attachments in UCS uploads via the upload API.
• Added support for images in UCS uploads via the upload API.

Captioning

• Added the option for 'edited' sessions to be sent for captioning. When enabled, if a session was recorded for 60 minutes and edited in Panopto to a duration of just 15 minutes, then sending that session for captioning will now result in only 15 minutes of captioning, not 60 minutes for the total duration of the recording.
• Modified the Panopto editor to block further editing when a session is in the process of being captioned.
• Updated the Caption Requests admin page to indicate whether a captioning request was for an 'edited session' or 'full streams'.
• Added the ability for admins to force the abandonment of a captioning request. Such requests will still incur captioning costs but can unblock other operations on the video within Panopto.
• Fixed an issue where captions were not displayed correctly in fullscreen mode.

Remote Recorders

• Added a new e-mail notification to administrators when a remote recorder is low on disk space.
• Added the session’s folder path to the downloadable remote recorder usage report.