UICapture Recent Changes

Summer 2022

Captions

• Find and Replace within the editor
• Confidence highlighting (ASR)
• ASR caption reprocessing
• Caption end times are now respected within the interactive and embedded viewers

Expanded Roles and Permissions

• We are now expanding the roles and permissions available within UICapture to allow for greater flexibility. Over time you may notice that there are more roles and permissions available to you at the video, folder, and department level.
• To start a new “Viewer with Download” role will be available. This role will allow you to share content with specific individuals and allow them to download the content being shared without changing the download availability setting for the video/folder for all users with access.

Instant Edit

• Edits made within the Panopto Editor will now process almost instantly, minimizing the downtime when changes need to be made to content.

Changes

Smart Chapters

• Smart chapters will now be set to apply automatically to all new content. You can turn this feature off within your folders or within specific videos if you’d like.
• This will create a table of contents for your videos, when possible, using Optical Character Recognition to pick up the titles that you are presenting.

User Interface

• A visual refresh of the Panopto User Interface including a more prominent “Create” button and search bar, a slightly redesigned Home/Department Home page.
• Within the folder interface, you can now simply toggle between content that is ready to view and content that has been removed from the folder and sent to the archive by the content retention process. The same is true of site/folder search results.

Content Retention

We are making a small change to the content retention processes in place. Currently, content that is identified as inactive (no views for 4 consecutive years) will be deleted and moved to the recycle bin where it can be restored within 90-days. Moving forward, we will still have the 4-year period of inactivity before any action is taken, however, at the 4-year mark, contnet will be moved to the Archive for an additional year before being removed from the platform. This will allow for a total of 5 years of inactivity before content is removed. This change will keep the content visible in searches, in your folders, and is able to be restored by viewers if it is in the Archive and they need to watch it.

Winter 2022

The winter 2022 release of Panopto is scheduled to be applied on January 8, 2022. 

New Features

Home page improvements

UICapture home pages will now support multiple curated playlists, and easy-to-navigate video carousels.

Content Reuse

https://support.panopto.com/s/article/Learn-About-Course-Copy-V2

An updated version of “course copy” is available for Canvas.  When a new course folder is provisioned in Panopto, Canvas will automatically identify videos from the prior course or template course and will reference-copy them into the new course’s folder. 

Video Reference Copies

https://support.panopto.com/s/article/Learn-About-Video-Reference-Copies

Users can now place a reference to a video within a new folder, so it can be distributed to a different audience. Reference copies allow some settings to be overridden, have a completely clean slate of student-contributed metadata, and do not consume stored hours or usage hours. Reference copies refer to the original video’s streams, table of contents, captions, quizzes, and other elements of the timeline, but allow modification of the video’s name, description, tags, access controls, and other settings. A user with creator access to a reference copy can convert it to a full copy just by opening the editor. A user with creator access to a reference copy can share it with viewers and those viewers do not require access to the original video. With this version of Panopto, all batch-copy operations will now create reference copies instead of full copies, including course copy, folder copy, and batch copy from the video session list.

Discussion Notifications

https://support.panopto.com/s/article/How-to-Use-Discussion-Notifications

With this release, all users will default to receiving a daily digest email of discussion comments and replies for their videos and comment threads.  Users can choose to opt out of this feature or choose to receive a daily digest or a notification about each comment.

Audio Descriptions

https://support.panopto.com/s/article/How-to-Add-Audio-Descriptions

To improve accessibility, Panopto’s viewer interfaces can now automatically pause and read audio descriptions aloud, using machine speech synthesis. Audio descriptions can be uploaded or created in the Panopto editor.

Mobile app distributed recording

Users of Panopto’s mobile application can now join and contribute video to an ongoing recording. This feature allows mobile devices to record a single event from multiple angles, with no special equipment required.

Mobile app accessibility improvements

Panopto’s mobile app meets WCAG Level A accessibility requirements, on both Android and iOS.

Support for browsers with third-party cookie restrictions

The Panopto embed viewer and embedded session chooser no longer have a dependency on third-party cookies, allowing them to function for users whose browsers have restricted the use of third-party cookies.

Behavior and Settings changes

• Internet Explorer 11 will be blocked after this release.  Once this change is applied, users who attempt to access Panopto will be prompted to upgrade to a modern browser. You can find Panopto's IE11 support policy here.
• When selecting videos in the VCMS session list, content creators will now see the option to batch copy, which will create reference copies.

Summer 2021

Panopto Version 11
Downtime: Saturday, June 26 from 8:00 pm through 11:00 pm

The summer 2021 release of Panopto is scheduled to be applied on the evening of June 26th. This upgrade will include a number of new features, some configuration changes, and a new minimum supported recorder version.

New Features

Multi-stream embedded player

Viewers are now able to configure the layout they would like to see in the embedded player used in ICON and elsewhere. In the upper right corner of the player, you will now see buttons to cycle through layouts and switch stream positions. Possible layouts include a focus on the primary, the secondary, picture in picture, or side-by-side views of the video streams.

Existing embeds will be automatically switched to this new player once the update is applied. No further action is needed from content managers.

Embedded content support in the embedded player

All options for embedded content (YouTube videos, PDFs, web pages) are now fully supported between the interactive web player and the embedded player. This content will still not be contained in downloaded videos.

Discussion Moderation

Content creators can moderate discussions for both live webcasts and on-demand videos, controlling which discussion comments are visible to the full audience of viewers. The default visibility of a discussion post can be controlled at the folder or video/webcast level.

• When the visibility is set to ‘private’ - only the original poster and the moderators can see the comment.

• When the visibility is set to ‘public’ - all discussion posts and replies are visible to everyone who has view access to the video. If the default is public, a user can still choose to post a comment privately.

• A moderator can choose to make an individual public thread private and vice-versa.

Multi-stream preview in Capture

After recording a video with Panopto Capture, users will now see all of their recorded streams in the preview viewer to increase confidence that all of their content has been captured correctly.

Multi-language Search and ASR Captions

You are now able to identify the language that content will be presented in within your folders. Setting the language for a folder will ensure that search and ASR captions are generated in that specific language.

Subscriptions

Users are now able to Subscribe to folders, tags, and creators so they are able to easily find and organize the content that has been shared with them. Subscribing to something will not change any entitlements, but it will allow users to organize the content they already had access to.

Improved sharing interface

The session/folder sharing interface has been overhauled to make it more clear where things have been shared.

When sharing via email, you are also now able to include a Table of Contents and Transcript from the video. This allows the recipients to search or “read” the video without leaving their email inbox.

Configuration Changes

Default Podcast Encoding Format

Guide: https://support.panopto.com/s/article/advanced-podcast-features-0

The default podcast encoding format (used when content is embedded or distributed through the RSS feed) will be changed from the current (picture-in-picture at 720p/30) to picture-in-picture at 1080p/60. Content that is below this mark (less than 1080p or less than 60 fps) will be encoded at the level that matches the content. Content that exceeds this mark (ex. 4k/60) will be scaled to this standard. There should be no operational impact as a result of this change.

Seek and Variable Speed Playback

After this update creators are able to restrict seek and VSP on individual videos. This setting can be found under a video settings > Manage > Disable seek and variable speed playback. Setting this attribute to Yes will prevent viewers from skipping sections of the video and it will turn off the drop-down to select playback rate.

Graded Quizzing

When a UICapture video quiz has been linked to an assignment in ICON, the player will warn the viewer if they are viewing the video in a way that wouldn't result in a grade passing back to ICON. It will not block them from doing so, but it will notify them that there is a grade involved.

The option to Clear all quiz results has also been enabled. This option can be helpful in the case that you are using a quiz from a previous term in a new ICON course. Clearing quiz results in UICapture will not change any grades in ICON.

New Recorder Minimum Version

Effective starting Friday, July 16th, at 7:00 pm

The new minimum version for recording with a Panopto desktop application will be 9.0.2 for Windows and 10.1.0 for macOS.

University Classrooms will be updated automatically prior to this date, but managed personal workstations and personally owned devices will need to be updated individually. Please contact the ITS Help Desk with any questions or concerns.

Upgrade Steps

Windows: https://support.panopto.com/s/article/Update-Panopto-for-Windows-to-the-Latest-Version
macOS: https://support.panopto.com/s/article/Update-Panopto-for-Mac-to-the-Latest-Version