Vidispine 4.16 Released Together with Vidinet Improvements

We have released Vidispine API 4.16, made improvements in the Vidinet Platform and extended the VDT UI Components with new components. Read more in the post below.

We mainly spent time developing and tuning infrastructure during the last product development cycle, all to prepare for larger things to come. We also made time to add new features and functionality in Vidispine API, Vidinet and the Vidispine Development Toolkit. This blog post is a compilation of the more important changes.

Improved search Search is essential in any content management system, especially in a world where the amount of content grows at a rapid speed and it's more likely that the content is unstructured than structured. We have improved the deep paging performance during a search by enabling the use of cursors (cursorMark/search after) from Solr and Elasticsearch. Vidispine API support cursors on collection and items searches, and when listing files, using the cursor parameter.

We also made another improvement to search by adding query boosting. Boost a field by adding it to the query temporary or add it to the specific fields during metadata definition to always boost that particular field. Query-time boosting is available for items and collections. With this it is easier to create searches and find the most relevant content, e.g., giving higher relevancy results where the keywords are in the title.

PUT /item Content-Type: application/xml title_field phoenix description_field phoenix _score descending Streaming from VSA We have improved streaming from the Vidispine Server Agent if you are on the same on-premise network as the VSA but are running a Vidispine API instance in Vidinet. Previously you had to access the files through the Vidispine API, now you can stream directly from the agent and thus improving performance. To make use of this, use the new method type AUTO-VSA when accessing the file.

Availability Version 4.16 is available today when creating a new Vidispine API service in Vidinet. For non-trial customers the existing Vidispine API instances running in Vidinet is upgraded to version 4.16 during a pre-announced maintenance window. If you are running your Vidispine API outside of Vidinet, 4.16 is available in Vidispine's support forum as well as in the official Vidispine repo.

Support We also made the following maintenance releases available; 4.16.1, 4.15.2 and 4.13.4. With this release, we have reached the end of maintenance for 4.13, and end of support for 4.11. Read more about Vidispine's release cycle.

During the last quarter of 2018, the bulk of our effort has been in under-the-hood improvement regarding performance, stability, and preparations for future enhancements. That did not stop us from making some improvements to the Vidinet experience.

Vidinet API as-a-service For the current release of Vidispine API on Vidinet, we have added support for NLE sequence render jobs, transcoding and thumbnailing of PDFs and audio file transcoding. Sequence rendering, audio and PDF transcoding run through Vidinet are priced per content minute, and it's possible to ask for a cost estimate before running the actual job, just as any other Vidinet service.

POST /API/sequence/render?tag=h264&resourceId=VX-42 For anyone visually oriented we have now made sure you can use the Vidispine graph-viz support on the as-a-service instances of Vidispine API. Graph-viz helps you visualize structure in your Vidispine repository. For example:

GET /API/item/VX-19/shape/VX-27/graph

The above improvements are available from version 4.16 of the Vidispine API.

Adding services We have made it easier to add new transcoder services to an existing Vidispine API as-a-Service instance during instance creation. All you have to do during creation is to select your instance and authenticate with your Vidispine API admin user. It's also possible to add already existing services to any Vidispine API instance directly from the dashboard of the instance.

Pause/resume We have also removed the need for re-indexing after a pause/resume; instead, Vidinet re-indexes the Vidispine API instance as part of the resume process.

Billing An active account tends to create quite a few billing records. To give you a better overview and only show what is necessary you can now select to hide all service with no cost for the selected period. You can find the billing records under Billing in the left-hand menu.

Vidispine Content Viewer The Vidispine Content Viewer that is supplied together with Vidispine API Starter Edition is now also available in the Vidispine API Team Edition. We have made numerous smaller improvements to the VCV user interface, and have added a PDF viewer, ability to play audio only assets in the player, and added grid sorting.

VDT UI Components saw an addition of two new components, the Tag component for adding searchable tags to items and collections, and the ColumnSorter component to make it easier to customize lists.

In the improvements department we added sorting in the Grid component, improved the Login prompt, allow you to disable Free Text in the search field, and some more.

The latest version of the VDT UI Components is available in Github for everyone licensing it. If you want to start working with VDT, sign up for Vidinet, spin up a Vidispine API, and then follow the instructions here to get access.

LINK:	https://www.vidispine.com/blog/vidispine-4-16-released-together-with-v...
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