Ooyala Flex 6.0.0 Release Notes 2017-08-17

What's New

With this release, we continue the commitment to listen to our customers, focus on performance, and quickly respond with new features and fixes. This update offers features that add more depth to how you can create and manage metadata and new tools to enable the management and publishing of your content.

Temporal Metadata

We have extended our asset model to support temporal metadata mapped to timelines in MAM. A timeline enables you to mark an event when it occurs during a video, and enter metadata to describe that event.

For example: you have a video of a soccer match. Every time a goal is scored, you could place a marker or range which contains metadata to describe the details of the goal such as: the player who scored it, the goalkeeper, the team, and so on.

Dynamic Timelines

With Dynamic timelines you can have multiple timelines for a single asset, each with its own defined Metadata, this allows the creation of timelines for specific elements in an assets lifecycle, event specifics, scene descriptors, soundtrack, product placement, legal, etc. that can be managed by separate teams. These timelines are configured using the Metadata Designer and are available in MAM and Reviewer. To configure a timeline in the Metadata Designer, you must do the following:

1. Create a variant
2. Create a timeline
3. Create a metadata definition and assign it to a timeline

Object Hierarchy Management

We have added the ability to manage user defined hierarchical structures in MAM. This allows you to: view, navigate, and create metadata instances which reflect data structures in a visual / interactive panel for advanced business reporting.

Note: Hierarchy / object definitions and configurations should be done in the Ooyala Flex interface. MAM allows a user to manage the instances of the metadata.

Plugins

* Azure Media Encoder: this gives you access to the full breadth of the cloud based encoding features of the Standard Media Encoder within Azure Media Services as another transcoding resource for Ooyala Flex users.
* New Replace Content Plugin: this plugin enables the replacement of assets in Ooyala Flex. The process overwrites the existing asset maintaining metadata that you have already applied with new technical metadata from the updated asset as a seamless process.
* End of Review: a new configuration has been added to the Start Session plugins, to enable you to customize the status buttons for the end of the review session. These buttons can move beyond Review/Approve to allow you have custom statuses like ‘Approve', ‘Reject', ‘Publish to Social’, or ‘Archive'. For each button, you can choose what label is displayed, what color the button should have, and whether metadata is associated with the status that this button represents.
* DIVArchive Video Restore: this new plugin gives you the ability to either restore a whole video or perform a partial restore on a video that is currently in your DIVArchive directly from Ooyala Flex. You can only restore a single asset at a time.
* Publish/Unpublish to Twitter: this enables you to publish or unpublish a video to Twitter, you can also publish/unpublish a tweet with the video.
* Remote Backlot Ingest: With this new feature you can now remove the need for HTTP transfer of assets to Backlot and instead move the asset to S3 storage along with the associated metadata sidecar that Backlot can access. This is especially useful for large assets and creates a reliable solution for publishing files through the Ooyala Video Platform.

REST API

* Timelines: new REST endpoints have been added in 6.0.0, in relation to timelines. These endpoints enable you to:
* Create new timelines
* Edit existing timelines
* Delete timelines
* Retrieve information for a specific timeline
* Retrieve a list of all existing timelines

These are as follows:

* Reviews: we have added REST endpoints that help you work with review sessions. This includes the ability to:
* Work with actions in review sessions
* Set "end of review" statuses
* Post and edit annotations

These are as follows:

* UDOT: the following endpoints have been introduced to coincide with support for object hierarchies in MAM.  These endpoints enable you to manage user defined object hierarchies.

* Members: We have added the group matrix parameter to the /assets/<assetId>/members. This parameter enables you to retrieve a list of group members and exclude all of the items in the group such as any media assets, image assets, and so on. Examples:

In order to retrieve just the group members, you would do the following-api/assets/members;group=true

In order to only list the group items, you would do the following- api/assets/members;group=false.

Publish API

An endpoint has been added to the Publish API, which retrieves group hierarchies. This is as follows:

``/public/api/assets/<groupId>/hierarchy``

Keywords and Metadata

* Forms: a new field type, Tag Collection, enables you to create a new tag collection, or to add, rename, or delete tags in an existing tag collection.

Known Issues

MAM

Please note the following known issues in MAM:

* Bulk metadata only supports multiplicities for basic string, text, long, integer, and multiple values with simple variable types. Multiplicities are also only supported for complexes with simple variable types.
* VFS locations are not currently supported in MAM.
* Only a certain number of root object types are shown in the left-hand toolbar; any additional root objects will not be visible.
* Free text search is supported, with limited advanced search.
* Temporal metadata is not currently searchable.
* UDO descriptions are not currently searchable.

Reviewer

* Currently, we don't support tags in Reviewer. Support for this will be added in the next release.

SDKs

* The SDK call `getUserDefinedObjects()` now requires a context parameter, whose value can be `null` or `all`. The value `all` returns a list of all UDOs, including children in the hierarchy. This change will be backward compatible from the 6.1.0 release.

Reindexing

Reindexing by account ID does not work.

Resolution

This will be fixed in the 6.0.2 release.

Expression Language

The expression `event/mioObject` will be deprecated, and should only be used when the event only includes `mioObject`.

`event.flexManagedObject` can be used for both `mioObject` and `mioJob`.

Therefore, the following changes have been made to configuration of expressions:

* For the Message template, use `event.flexManagedObject` instead of `event.mioObject`.
* For Event handler expressions, use `event.flexManagedObject` instead of `event.mioObject`.

Job Searchability

Jobs are no longer searchable from Global Search. Nor do jobs support a full text search. Instead, they are searchable by specific filters, such as owner, deleted, and status.

Appendix