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Summer Service Update 2020-06-27 (Panopto 9)
Meghal Patel
Panopto Employee
Recently Released Features
- New Mobile app — Earlier this month, we released a completely new app for iOS and Android, giving users a modern, fast, and intuitive way to discover and watch relevant content from their organization’s video library right on their mobile devices. The new app supports offline videos, personalized home screen, a comprehensive search experience, and ability to upload or record new videos using their phone’s camera. The new app is available in the iOS and Android app stores.
- JavaScript Embed APIs — Developers can now embed and control Panopto videos on external websites using JavaScript. The new JavaScript Embed APIs provide a comprehensive set of capabilities to allow you to not only control playback, but also create interactive capabilities on top of Panopto’s embed viewer, enabling scenarios like custom quizzing applications or conditional branching within the video. The API documentation, including sample code, can be found here.
- Multi-language Captions — Earlier this year, we introduced language-specific caption tracks, allowing users to upload caption files for multiple languages on the captions settings modal for any video. Both the interactive and embedded players automatically display captions in the user’s current browser language and make it easy for users to switch which language’s captions are displayed.
Beta Features
The release on June 27th includes several 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.
- Custom Roles (beta) — Custom roles give administrators finer control over user permissions. Administrators will be able to modify built-in roles and create new roles that fit the unique permission and workflow needs of the organization. For example, you can create a custom role that allows a data analyst to view Panopto analytics dashboards and reports without the ability to view, edit, or delete sessions.
- Smart Chapters (beta) — Panopto’s innovative new Smart Chapters feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate a table of contents for any video with a screen capture. Smart Chapters is designed to work for videos recorded by Panopto Capture or from other sources where PowerPoint or Keynote slides are not available. When enabled as "available on-demand,” users can choose to import Smart Chapters within Panopto’s editor interface.
- Improved Course Copy for Canvas (beta) — Canvas administrators will have an additional option for reusing content from prior courses in new ones. Instead of only providing students in the new course access to videos in the prior course’s folder, those videos can be automatically copied into the new course folder. All student-contributed data — including discussions, quiz results, notes, and usage analytics — will be reset automatically. Additionally, when one of the copied videos has been embedded in the Canvas course via LTI, the embed will now automatically use the video in the new course folder. This is an opt-in, beta feature. Please contact support if you wish to try the beta and provide feedback on the design.
Behavior and Settings changes
Important Changes
- Zoom Recording Import — Improved stability and made minor improvements to Zoom recording import. Important Note: Customers who set up their Zoom integration before Feb 21, 2020, will need to go to the Zoom Integration page on their Panopto site and click "Reconnect" in order to take full advantage of this improvement. If you reconnected their accounts at least once after 2/21/2020, then this operation is not needed. If you have multiple Zoom accounts connected to your Panopto site, then you will need to do this for each one. Please contact Panopto support if you need assistance with the above.
- Internet Explorer 11 Maintenance mode — Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) support will be placed in ‘maintenance mode’. This means only critical issues affecting IE11 will be fixed. Newer features will no longer be tested on IE11, which implies they may not function properly. In certain cases, we might need to block newer features if IE11 does not support the required capabilities. Please click here to get more information on the Internet Explorer 11 maintenance mode support, including why we are making this decision, how to prepare for this change and other FAQs.
Settings & Behavior updates
The following settings have been added in this release:
- Enable Custom Roles (beta) — This setting is OFF by default and can be changed only by Panopto Support. Please contact Panopto Support to enable and test custom roles on your test site. If your organization doesn’t have a test site, Panopto Support will enable one for you.
- Enable Smart Chapters (beta) — This setting will allow you to control Smart Chapters for your site. By default, the setting is set to ‘Don’t generate table of contents’ which implies Smart Chapters are off by default. You can use the setting to make Smart Chapters “Available on demand”, which means a creator can choose to generate Smart Chapters for a video. You can also turn this on by default for all videos by setting it to “Automatically add to my videos”.
The following settings and behavior have changed in this release:
- Mobile App Release — As the new mobile apps are out of beta, the choices for the Mobile App Release has been updated from “Beta” to “New” — for the newly released apps and from “Production” to “Legacy” — for the current apps. If your organization previously opted-in the beta release of the new app, then this setting will now default to “New”.
- Changed the default behavior in Zoom recordings import, to create separate Panopto videos, when recording is stopped and restarted within the same meeting.
- Strong Passwords — Strong Passwords are not required by default on all sites. The password complexity requirements, for the internal Panopto Id Provider, has been updated to be at least 8 characters long and must contain at least one digit, symbol, lowercase letter, and uppercase letter. Note: This update will not force a password reset. It will apply to new user accounts and when users reset their password. External Id Providers are not affected by this change.
- Remote Recorder Delete After Upload Delay — Updated description for "Remote Recorder Delete After Upload Delay" setting, to clarify the minimum required remote recorder version is 7.1.1.
The following settings have been removed in this release:
- Enable HTML Emails — After this release, this setting will not be available to site administrators. And as part of deprecating non-HTML emails, for sites that are already using HTML emails, the setting cannot be changed. For customers using non-HTML emails, Panopto team will work with you to transition to HTML email.
- SCORM Manifest — In January cloud update, SCORM manifests were enabled for all sessions. After the June 2020 release, SCORM Manifest cannot be disabled.
- Enable branding on embedded viewer — After this release, for all branded sites, the brand logo and colors will always be reflected in the embed viewer. If your site doesn’t use a brand color or logo, there will be no change in behavior.
Improvements and fixes
VCMS & User experience
- Italian language support — Panopto will now display text in Italian various user interfaces when the user's locale is set to Italian. Additionally, Italian is a supported language for generating captions and allowing smart search based on spoken words as well as on-screen text including slide presentations in Italian.
- Updated password complexity requirements for the internal Panopto Id Provider. (External Id Providers are not affected by this change.) Passwords by default must be at least 8 characters long and must contain at least one digit, symbol, lowercase letter, and uppercase letter.
- URLs and emails in video descriptions are now automatically displayed as clickable links in the embed and interactive viewers.
- With Internet Explorer 11 going into maintenance mode, viewers watching Panopto videos in IE 11 will see a banner prompting them to use a modern browser for a better experience. This alert can be dismissed by the user.
- Fixed an issue with the "Shared with me" page that listed the share date of new sessions as earlier than the session's creation date, when the session was shared via folder permissions.
- Fixed an issue where remote recorder quality sliders could get stuck on a specific setting.
- Fixed an issue where Panopto for Mac recording uploads failed in some rare situations.
- Fixed an issue where the upload dialog showed an inaccurate message for iOS devices.
- Fixed a minor localization issue for German language.
Captioning
- Fixed an issue where captions were misaligned in some situations for Right-to-Left languages.
Integrations
- Added the ability for students to submit video assignments in D2L. Students can now upload a video to Panopto and submit it as a response to an assignment in D2L.
- Fixed an issue where the wrong error message was displayed when videos embedded in an LMS were deleted from Panopto.
- Fixed an issue where an internal error occurred when trying to sign into Panopto site using Moodle authentication from the sign-in link on the public Panopto site homepage.
- Fixed an issue where some SCORM links returned an HTTP 400 instead of displaying the content if the user was not already signed into Panopto.
Zoom Integration
- Changed the default behavior in Zoom recordings import, to create separate Panopto videos, when recording is stopped and restarted within the same meeting.
- Fixed an issue where Zoom meeting import feature did not identify the meeting host or participants correctly if email address of Zoom account and Panopto account have different upper / lower case characters.
- Fixed an issue where the behavior was not clear when "Allowed User Group" of Zoom integration setting is empty. An additional explanation was added to this setting.
Media
- Improved RTMP ingest capability to support ingesting 32 kHz audio in addition to 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz.
- Increased the number of supported formats for videos uploaded to the web interface.
Analytics
- Updated CSV downloads to generate delimiter specific to the user's locale and region, instead of it always being a comma.
- Fixed an issue where the System Status page reported every instance of opening the viewer as a "view or download" regardless of whether any playback occurred.
Search
- Italian language support - Italian is a supported language for generating captions and allowing smart search based on spoken words as well as on-screen text in Italian.
Public APIs
- Added a new REST API endpoint (api/v1/sessions/{id}/viewers) to get a list of users that have viewed a specific video, including what percentage of the video they have viewed.
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Comments
Correction:
For 'Multi-language Captions' — We erroneously documented that "Both the interactive and embedded players automatically display captions in the user’s current browser language".
Currently, the browser language does not automatically select the caption language. The user has to manually change it in the interactive or embedded player.
We are working on adding this feature in the near future.