Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.9.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the September 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.9.0.

This release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform provides the new features, quality and security enhancements, bug fixes, and other changes listed below.

Flex 2020.9 is an interim release track, allowing customers to make use of the latest functionality and bug fixes in Flex before the next LTS (Long Term Supported) release track becomes available. 

As an interim release track, it should be noted that this release: 

• will only receive security updates once the next track (2020.10) is available. 
• will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.12) is available. 

Package Un-TAR Asset Plugin

A new JEF action plugin "Un-Tar" is introduced in this release. When this action plugin is executed against any Tar Asset, it will extract images, i.e. dpx/exr/tif from tar files to create an Image Sequence Asset in Flex. This plugin also supports un-tarring of sub-set of tars.

Metadata - Plugin Schema Registration

Flex JEF plugins can register required Metadata Definitions that are required by the plugin. For example, a “Video Analysis plugin” could use this feature to deploy a Metadata Definition that defines the data structure (e.g.: sentiment, Face recognition properties) that will be used to store the result. A job executing this plugin will create a Metadata Instance using the registered definition and populate the data as needed. JEF Plugin developers should use this feature to provide Metadata Definition to be deployed as part of their plugins to avoid the need for administrators to manually create or import metadata definitions.

Resolved Issues

• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby DPX Image Asset Sequence assets would fail when imported from S3 storage bucket.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby image overlay and output to ProRes would fail.
• Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby the object.assetContext.formatContext.duration Method returned the wrong duration.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby jobs would fail when filenames included multiple spaces.
• Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby jobs were failing and could not be cancelled due to removing object variable for respective workflow.
• Flex Enterprise - Made improvements to Enterprise code and reduced multiple calls to the same database by caching information to improve performance.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Enhanced Flex Media Processing Engine to return Media Object (MOB) IDs when performing FSP stitch jobs.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue when utilising the Linux Flex Media Processing Engine Closed Captions were not available in Avid Interplay.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby Extract Technical Metadata Jobs were failing
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Introduced improvements to align the new Linux Flex Media Processing Engine with the Windows version.
• Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby it was not possible to cancel hanging active resource items in a Web Transfer resource.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue whereby the Linux Flex Media Processing Engine did not check-in growing files correctly to Avid Interplay
• Flex JEF Plugins – Introduced support to enable the creation of asset proxies which contain special characters (',",%,@,*,^,~)
• Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby the Transcode action sets the output new file as Segmented Proxy origin even though not a Create proxy action, this is not set to ‘Transcode’.
• Flex Enterprise – Resolved an issue whereby new asset created from Sequence had the wrong workspace defined.
• Flex JEF Plugins – Updated the configuration of the Republish/Unpublish JWPlayer plugin to use the Publish job configuration.
• Flex Publish Service – Resolved an issue whereby the Publish API could not search by a date-formatted field.
• Flex Publish Service – Resolved an issue whereby the Publish API could not sort by a String field.
• Flex Stream Processor Service – Resolved an issue in the Linux Flex Media Processing Engine which did not set the asset name in Avid Interplay
• Flex Enterprise – Introduced logic to source audio waveform file location based on an assets location instead of relying on account level waveform folder resource for un-managed assets.
• Flex Subtitle – Introduced support for performing Subtitle Technical Metadata Extractions on subtitle assets stored in cloud storage.
• Flex JEF Plugins – Implemented expression evaluations in JEF Profile configurations.
• Flex Enterprise – Introduced additional asset type support for searchable in Web Transfer application, Subtitle assets are not appearing in metadata section in Web-transfer.

Known Issues

• SQL migration taking time - Following SQL added as part of FLEX-57994 to alter the foreign key which is taking around 24min for 14M records of mio_action_info table: V1599464642__alter_fk_close_session_info_in_mio_action_info_table.sql
• Reviewer player is not playing media asset when Publish action v1 or v2 is executed using Azure storage.
• If a file is removed from a DPX Image Sequence Asset source package after its import job has failed (for example if it is invalid or corrupt), Flex still creates the member for that asset.
• Assign user and group to workspace and then disable user and group. Further add\remove group and user to workspace gives error.
• If path property from a storage vfslocation start with keyword (s3xxxxx, gcsxxxxx, azbsxxxxx... or others on filesystem-library), Demux, CompostionSequenceProxy, TranscodeProxy will fail Extracting Technical Metadata after main transcode step is completed by FSP.
• Extract technical metadata action on CPL and AS02 will not work. We have ticket to remove those actions.

Please contact your Dalet Ooyala representative for the full upgrade notes, further information about this release, and the complete list of resolved issues.