Avalon 7.
...
Avalon 7.0.0 is now available for download at the Github releases page.
Release Notes
Avalon 7.0 is a major release with changes relevant to end users, collection managers and system administrators.
Features
Collections Index and Collection Landing Pages
Avalon 7 provides two new ways to explore and display collections: the collections index, a listing that shows each collection accessible to a user sorted alphabetically or by containing Unit, and collections landing pages, which provide a unique page for each collection where users can view a description, thumbnail and a preview of items within. Collection managers can now set thumbnails for collections as well as items.
Transcoding Pipeline
With this release of Avalon, the transition from Matterhorn to a self-managed transcoding process has been completed. Using the latest version of active-encode and the FFmpeg adapter, transcoding tasks are faster, leaner, and more flexible. A new transcoding dashboard also provides administrators a way to manage jobs directly within Avalon. While Matterhorn is no longer supported, full support is available for Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service.
New Homepage Design
Avalon's homepage has been redesigned. In addition to the visual change, Avalon allows for easy configuration of the featured collections now displayed on the homepage. The Avalon 6.x-style homepage can also still be used if desired.
Local User Management
A new authentication configuration is available through Persona. This module allows for administrators to quickly create user credentials without relying on an outside authentication system (LDAP, Shibboleth, etc.).
Updates and Other Changes
Sidekiq
The performant, feature-rich, and better maintained Sidekiq replaces Resque as our default background job engine. This aligns Avalon with most Samvera applications, including Hyrax, which have already made this switch.
MinIO
It is now possible to use a MinIO object store to avoid a shared storage requirement and decouple Avalon, Worker, and Streaming services from each other in alignment with 12 factor best practices.
Avalon API
The Avalon API has been updated to allow for access to resources based on system role. API keys issued to users now gate requests to permissions a user has within the system, rather than providing superuser rights for each issued key.
Bug Fixes
- Multiple styling issues on mobile browsers resolved
- Structural Metadata Editor now properly handles certain timecode formats in existing structure
- Caption files with empty terminating time ranges display properly when enabled
...
7.2
Bugfixes
- Fixed Add to Playlist Bug Where Track Information Does Not Populate
- Add to playlist button disabled on iPhone Safari until user plays media item
- Fixed a bug where the Create Thumbnail action created unnecessary network requests
Release page: https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/releases/tag/v7.7.2
Avalon 7.7.1
Bugfixes
- Media file duration is now set to the value reported during encoding instead of the imprecise value returned by the mediainfo tool
- Action buttons on the item page are only enabled after the player is completely loaded
- Fixed slow loading of the Manage Content page
- Fixes for player styling and icon sizes
Captions
- Added missing SRT format support for caption files
- Captions have been removed from HLS manifests for greater compatibility
- Default language value for captions is set to the system default during migration
Updates
- Collection ID has been added to media object JSON responses
- Positional URLs for playlist items are supported again (i.e. avalon-site.edu/playlists/##?position=3)
- Fixes and improvements to the Avalon reindexing script
- Fuzzier searching added to the playlists listing
- The Create Thumbnail button is now disabled for audio items
- Security updates for smaller dependencies
Release page: https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/releases/tag/v7.7.1
Avalon 7.7
Avalon 7.7 includes significant changes to the media player, dependency upgrades, and a variety of bug fixes and minor improvements.
See the Upgrading Avalon 7.6 to Avalon 7.7 page for upgrade instructions.
Updates and Changes
- Ramp, a general-purpose media player designed for use with IIIF manifests, replaces the existing MediaElement.js-based player
- Improvements to accessibility that bring user-facing Avalon pages up to WCAG 2 Level AA conformance
- Application speed has been greatly improved on the Playlist and Item page
- Multiple caption files can now be associated per media file, and language can be assigned for each caption file
- Transcripts can be marked as "machine-generated" to appear differently in the UI
- New "Add to Playlist" form provides greater flexibility when adding media to playlists
- "Series" added as a new descriptive metadata field that also appears as a facet for browsing
- Many fixes for UI/UX on iOS and Android devices
- Fix for an extension error in some transcript files when downloading
- Previous and Next buttons added to the media player for easier navigation between sections
- Transcript component automatically scrolls along with media playback
- Searching in the Timeline listing has been changed to allow for friendlier, fuzzier matching
- Updates to IIIF manifest generation
- Support for reCaptcha v3
- Support for Solr 9
- Changes to collection admin page permissions forms
- IIIF Authentication has been removed from publicly accessible items
- Structural Metadata Editor now displays video when available
- Managers can now be added to the Editor role for a collection
- Rake task added for cleaning up stray files from encoding with FFmpeg
- A new administrative facet allows filtering by item access level
Releases Page
https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/releases
If you have questions or need assistance, please email us at avalon-discuss-l@list.indiana.edu.
...
Contact us on our public Slack
...
channel: samvera.slack.com/messages/avalon.
Joining a Slack team requires an invitation, but anyone can generate an automatic invite to the Samvera Community slack channel using the following form: Samvera Slack invite.
...
...
...