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Winter Service Update 2020-12-19

Meghal PatelMeghal Patel Panopto Employee
edited February 2023 in Release Notes

(Dec 18th - Post updated with latest information)

The following features, improvements, and bug fixes will be available on Panopto's production environments on Dec 19, 2020.

Headline Features

  • Webex Meetings Integration — The integration allows enterprises and educational institutions to securely and automatically transfer Webex Meetings recordings into their Panopto on-demand video library, where they become searchable and shareable at scale inside businesses and across virtual and physical campuses. For more information see How to Set Up a Cisco Webex Meetings Integration.

Smart Chapters automatically creates a table of contents inside each Webex Meetings recording.


  • 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. 

  • 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, Zoom, and WebEx. 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.


  • 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


  • Audio Normalization — Creators can make audio levels consistent throughout their video stream by using the new audio normalization feature in the editor.


  • Updated Mobile apps — In the next app update, coming out soon, users will be able to upload or record videos more reliably. The new version will support background upload without needing to keep the app active. Users will automatically get this update from Android and iOS app stores when the new version is released.

Beta Features

Additionally, we have a few 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.

  • SubscriptionsBETA — 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’. 


  • Panopto Capture Virtual BackgroundBETA  — 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.

  • Multiple Content Language SupportBETA — Added a new feature to specify the content language at each folder. Panopto's search feature optimizes its indexing for the specified language. This feature is beta at this time and Panopto support team can turn this on for your site upon request.


Behavior and Settings changes

Settings & Behavior updates

With the Dec 19th update, there will be some changes to the site settings.

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. 
  • Enable Smart Chapters — The Smart Chapters feature was turned ON and set to ‘Available on-demand’ for all sites on Oct 12 2020, except for the customers who had explicitly changed the default state. “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. 
  • Store Meeting Participants or Invitees — This site setting controls whether information about meeting attendees is stored for Zoom recording imports. This is ON by default. Please note: This setting works with all Zoom and Webex Meetings imports, but will remove the ability to use automatic sharing.
  • 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 SubscriptionsBETA 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.
  • Enable Subscriptions (BETA) — The subscriptions feature is available in beta for customers. For the Dec release, the Subscriptions feature will be in beta and OFF by default. 
  • Disable Capture Virtual Background (BETA) — For the Dec release, the Capture Virtual Background feature will be in beta and enabled by default. This site setting controls whether the background blur or background replacement feature is available in Panopto Capture. Administrators can turn this feature off by setting the value of "Disable Capture Virtual Background (beta)" setting to 'True'

The following settings have changed in this release:

  • Enable Capture for recording from the Embedded Video Selector — This setting controls whether Panopto Capture is available in the embedded video selector. With the Dec update, this site setting will be turned ON by default for all customers. 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.
  • Default Playback Bitrate for SSF — This site-setting controls the bitrate for legacy SSF format. As part of the Dec release, this setting will not be available to site administrators. Please contact Panopto Support if you have any questions regarding this setting.
  • Disable Mobile App Recording — This site-setting controls the availability of upload and record functionality on the mobile apps (new and legacy). As part of the Dec release, this setting will not be available to site administrators. Please contact Panopto Support if you have any questions regarding this setting..

Improvements and fixes

VCMS & User experience

  • Updated the icon and UI text for "Panopto for Windows or Mac" (depends on the user's machine) and for "Panopto Capture".
  • Added number of recordings in the left navigation bar for any recordings ‘In Progress’ or ‘Scheduled’ in the future.
  • Created a new 'Details' tab in the viewer where the video title, descriptions, tags (if enabled), and created by information is shown. This information except for created by (which is newly added) used to be in the Contents tab.  
  • Added ability to select the display time zone for the datetime shown in the activity log for a video.
  • Fixed an issue where the video player did a layout stutter when loading the viewer in some situations.
  • Fixed an issue where the viewer shows a video is muted but audio is not actually muted.
  • Fixed an issue in session merge where quizzes from the source session were not correctly included in the new session.
  • Fixed an issue with session merge where thumbnails from the source session were not correctly included in the new session.
  • Fixed an issue where altering the assignment folder setting "Allow viewers to see each other's sessions" did not write to the audit log.
  • Fixed an issue where the active "User Licenses" count on the license plan page could omit some active users.
  • Fixed an issue in Capture, where changing video capture resolution led to a corrupted video stream when smart camera is enabled.
  • Fixed an accessibility issue in Capture where users could get into a bad UI state when using keyboard.
  • Added a 'heading' element to read video titles in the interactive player to help screen reader accessibility.
  • Fixed an accessibility issue where it was not possible to switch tabs in the interactive player using keyboard or screen readers. Now users can access and move between tabs using arrow keys.
  • Fixed an accessibility issue where hiding or showing the left panel in the interactive player wasn't announced correctly
  • Updated the term for 'recording' in Japanese language to be more accurate in Panopto context.
  • Fixed incorrectly translated strings for assignment folders in German and Turkish languages.
  • Updated several strings with more accurate and contextual translated terms for various languages.

Editor

  • Added ability to edit video title, description, and add or remove tags from the new Details tab in the Editor. The details tab also shows the user who created the video.
  • For the “Delete Stream in Editor” added a warning dialog if there are captions associated with the stream being deleted. 
  • Fixed an issue where processing step was run unnecessarily, if an existing thumbnail is chosen for the video thumbnail in the editor, leading to a delay in session availability.
  • Fixed an issue with video thumbnails where cutting out the section of the video containing the video’s thumbnail did not cause a new thumbnail to be chosen.
  • Fixed an issue with video thumbnails where a previously uploaded video thumbnail persisted after choosing a new default thumbnail in the editor.
  • Fixed an issue where the editor was incorrectly calculating relative start time for primary streams causing issues editing a recording.
  • Fixed an issue where the table of contents entry box was not laid out correctly in the editor.

Integrations

  • Added a new feature to Zoom meeting integration to opt-out storing information about meeting attendees. This is a new site level setting titled "Store meeting participants or invitees".
  • Added a feature to send email notification to the meeting owner when a Webex Meeting video is imported.
  • Modified how we provision folders that copy the LMS course structure to no longer create empty groups for non-course folders.
  • Added a feature to Webex Meeting integration where recordings imported for a user who does not have a Panopto user account will be automatically delivered to the user's personal folder when Panopto user account is created.
  • Fixed an issue where Zoom integration failed to copy the meeting videos to a new Panopto user’s personal folder when that user account is created. Note this issue only occurs when  "enable Zoom recording imports for all Zoom users without a Panopto account" option is on.

Media

  • Fixed an issue where recordings that switch between landscape and portrait resolutions could resize some videos affecting video clarity.
  • Fixed a rare issue where podcast encodes for sessions with slides could fail.
  • Fixed an issue where recorders that disconnect for a short while during upload could have their uploads reset. 
  • Fixed a rare issue where Remote Recorders could fail to upload screen captures.
  • Fixed an issue in distributed recordings where processing can fail if the recorder temporarily disconnects during the recording.

Core Services

  • Fixed an issue where the embed transcript task could fail consistently for some transcripts.
  • Fixed an issue where the Panopto Watch Folder Service would fail to upload content.

API

  • Added the ability to set a session's availability to ‘never’ in UpdateSessionsAvailabilityStartSettings SOAP API. You can now send a SessionStartSettingType of "Never" to override a session to never be available.

Version: 10.0.0 (Panopto 10)

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