On Saturday, June 27th, your Panopto cloud site will be upgraded to the latest release. This upgrade will occur from 10:00 pm to 1:00 am BST. We expect up to 90 minutes of viewer downtime, beginning at the start of the maintenance window.
Recently Released Features
-
New Mobile apps — Earlier this month, we released completely new apps for iOS and Android, giving users a modern, fast, and intuitive way to discover and watch relevant content from your organization’s video library right on their mobile devices. The new apps support offline videos, personalized home screen, a comprehensive search experience, and ability to upload or record new videos using their phone’s camera. The new apps are available in the iOS and Android app stores.
-
JavaScript Embed APIs — Developers can now embed and control Panopto videos on external websites using Javascript. The new Javascript Embed APIs provide a comprehensive set of capabilities to allow you to not only control playback, but also create interactive capabilities on top of Panopto’s embed viewer, enabling scenarios like custom quizzing applications or conditional branching within the video. The API documentation, including sample code, can be found here.
-
Multi-language Captions — Earlier this year, we introduced language-specific caption tracks, allowing users to upload caption files for multiple languages on the captions settings modal for any video. Both the interactive and embedded players automatically display captions in the user’s current browser language and make it easy for users to switch which language’s captions are displayed.
Beta Features
The release on June 27th will also make several new 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.
-
Custom RolesBETA — Custom roles give administrators finer control over user permissions. Administrators will be able to modify built-in roles and create new roles that fit the unique permission and workflow needs of the organization. For example, you can create a custom role that allows a data analyst to view Panopto analytics dashboards and reports without the ability to view, edit, or delete sessions.
-
Smart ChaptersBETA — Panopto’s innovative new Smart Chapters feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate a table of contents for any video with a screen capture. Smart Chapters is designed to work for videos recorded by Panopto Capture or from other sources where Powerpoint or Keynote slides are not available. When enabled as "available on-demand,” users can choose to import Smart Chapters within Panopto’s editor interface.
-
Improved Course Copy for CanvasBETA — Canvas administrators will have an additional option for reusing content from prior courses in new ones. Instead of only providing students in the new course access to videos in the prior course’s folder, those videos can be automatically copied into the new course folder. All student-contributed data — including discussions, quiz results, notes, and usage analytics — will be reset automatically. Additionally, when one of the copied videos has been embedded in the Canvas course via LTI, the embed will now automatically use the video in the new course folder. This is an opt-in, beta feature. Please contact support if you wish to try the beta and provide feedback on the design.
In addition to these headline features, we will also have several other improvements and bug fixes in the June 27 release. These details will be updated in the release notes documentation.
Important Summer Dates
-
June 27 downtime: On Saturday, June 27, the Panopto Cloud will be updated with the latest features and improvements. These updates will require downtime. We expect up to 3 hours of downtime, with a target start time of 9:00 pm GMT/10 pm BST.
During the downtime, you will not be able to access videos on your Panopto site, and any attempts to upload from recording clients will result in a "Server unable to connect" message.
-
Mandatory Client Upgrade: On Friday, July 17, we will require Panopto for Windows, Panopto for Mac, and Remote Recorders to be upgraded to version 7.1 or above. The upgrade will be applied to your Panopto site at 1:00 am BST/12:00 am GMT.
-
August 2020 downtime: On Saturday, August 15, we will be making a number of updates to the Panopto Cloud infrastructure to improve performance and scalability. These updates will require downtime. We will announce the exact time and expected duration of the downtime closer to the downtime date. See the cloud upgrade FAQ article for more information.
For any questions about this release, please contact Panopto Support online at support.panopto.com. You can also email us at support@panopto.com.
