Category: United States Zone

• March 31, 2018

  United States Zone – Semi-Monthly RC20180330 Released

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. Please note that this release will be pushed to Canadian zones next week. This release includes over 70+ new features and improvements including:

  1. Improved In-Video Commenting with Timeline Commenting and Pop-up Comment Bubbles – We improved in-video commenting by enabling the ability to comment directly on the video timeline, see comments on the timeline, and see “pop-up” comments as the video plays. As you’re using the new capabilities, we encourage you to provide feedback on ways you’d like to use this capability so that our Product Team can extend and expand it.
  2. In-Video Quiz Suite Now Part of Media – We’ve extended the video quizzing to be integrated more deeply with the Video Platform as a whole. While this will change how users create and access quizzes, we are confident that the improvements will make it even easier to create video-based assessments. Here are some of the details:
     • Top-Bar Take-Quiz Workflow – Quizzes that are available for users to “take” are now linked directly within the top-bar of the Platform (look for a new “Bell” icon). This makes it easier for students to find available quizzes without having to “dig into” the Polls & Quizzes suite.
     • Quizzes Stored in My Account tab – Created text-based and video quizzes are now stored in your My Accounts under a sub-tab called My Assessments.
     • UI Refinements – We also tidied up some naming inconsistencies with the use of the term “poll”, resolved a Unicode oversight that prevented non-English languages from being used for quiz questions, as well as a few other smaller improvements.
     • Supports In-Video Commenting – In-video quizzes can be used in conjunction with in-video commenting.
  3. New Tab Orientation for Media Details – To accommodate the new Comments tab within Media Details, our design folks switched the tabs to stack vertically. We will be further refining the user experience within the Media Details sub-tabs in upcoming releases.
  4. HTML5 Video Conferencing (alpha) – Our plan to migrate capabilities from the Flash-based Video Classrooms tool to the HTML5-based Video Conferencing continues. In this release, we moved over record-and-replay capabilities. We’re getting there!

  Looking ahead, in the next release we’ll be providing some feature updates to the HTML5 Video Editor, providing better self-service Bulk Downloading capabilities, new Live Streaming capabilities, and much more.

• March 17, 2018

  United States Zone – Semi-Monthly RC20180316 Released

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. Please note that this release will be pushed to Canadian zones next week. This release includes over 80+ new features and improvements including:

  1. General Availability of new Media Chooser for Canvas with Analytics Capabilities – We are now offering all customers with more powerful LMS media embedded with the Canvas Media Chooser to track analytics. To take advantage of this, please uninstall the old Canvas Media Chooser and follow the installation documents to install the new one with the revised Paste XML. If you have questions on how to install this, please email us at support@yuja.com.
  2. Emebeddable Live Stream Media Player – Administrators can now pre-schedule an embeddable HTML5-based HLS-compliant Live Stream Player. This expands the available use-cases to include guest speakers, events and graduation ceremonies. Through March and April we will be rolling out a number of exciting Live Streaming capabilities that will also move to General Availability.
  3. New Live Stream “Waiting Room” Experience – For pre-scheduled Live Stream events, if users try to enter a scheduled Live Stream ahead of time, they will now receive an waiting room UI with a countdown timer. Once the event starts, they will be automatically placed in the live stream.
  4. New Media Details Pop-up for Faster Media Organization – When users access the More… option within the Media Library for a particular media object, we now offer a fast-loading inline pop-up rather than having to click to navigate to a new page.
  5. Additional Player Branding Options – Administrators can now customize which options they would like to have within their Media Player’s secondary menu. We also did some further refinements to the Media Player playback experience.
  6. Minor Aesthenic Improvements for Processing Media – We improves some of the visuals for the ingestion process as well as improved the main menu button. This is part of a longer-term initiative to bring visual and user experience consistency to all suites.
• March 3, 2018

  United States Zone – Semi-Monthly RC20180302 Released

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. Please note that this release will be pushed to Canadian zones next week. This release includes 150 new features and improvements including:

  1. Easier to Use Main View with Action Buttons for Common Workflows – The Platform user interface has been updated to include the most common tasks as Action Buttons in the top-bar. Users can access media channels, create captures, and manage & uploads media all from the main screen.
  2. Refined Media Player with Better Search Visualization and Small-Screen Capabilities – We’re introducing a new Media Player which offers even easier to navigate search-inside-video capabilities, improved embeddability in smaller windows, and better support for mobile devices and tablet screen sizes. We also added some new capabilities including topic highlighting in the auto-scrolling sidebar, better search-inside-video sidebar, and a simplified Play-Bar.
  3. Live, Multi-Source Room Preview Snapshots of Active Captures – The latest Software Capture applications for both PC and Apple, as well as the latest Hardware Hub firmware now supports multi-source preview within the Admin Panel’s Devices tab. Administrators can now keep tabs on active room recordings with periodically updating snapshots of actively recording rooms and lecture halls.
  4. New Quiz Question Types and Refined Quiz-Taking Interface – The Video Quiz suite now has new question types including Multi-Select, Short Answer and True-False options.
  5. Auto-Captioning Support Now Available in Six New Languages – As part of the more powerful Artificial Intelligence-based auto-captioning engine we integrated in the last release, we are now introducing the ability to auto-caption in additional languages including French, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
  6. Improved Support for Legacy Browsers – Our focus was improving support for the deprecated since IE Edge – but still used – Internet Explorer browser.
  7. Improved Media Library Performance – We optimized a number of heavily used search and general sub-routines to make them much faster. Our performance tests in various physical zones showed improvements in overall Media Library load time and snappier navigation.
  8. Additional Infrastructural Work for HTML5 Video Conferencing – While still in an alpha state, we have continued to bolster the infrastructure, as well as, migrate over functionality from our Flash-based Video Classroom. We expect this suite to enter Beta in the March / early-April timeframe.
• February 13, 2018

  United States Zone – Performance Optimization for Analytics

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed 5 optimizations focused on improving the dynamic generation and loading of the new Overview tab for Visual Analytics. The result of this optimization is that on our customer’s production data workloads, there is a 5x improvement in load speed compared to the version we deployed on Friday.

• February 10, 2018

  United States Zone – Semi-Monthly RC20180209 Released

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. Please note that this release will be pushed to Canadian zones next week. This release includes 75 new features and improvements including:

  1. New Visual Analytics Overview tab – After extensive research and feedback about what Administrators wished to see in the Analytics Overview, we’ve incorporated more relevant statistics and a more attractive look-and-feel.
  2. Improved Media Preview for Non-Video Digital Assets – Organizations storing digital assets such as Word, Excel, PowerPoints, PDFs, images, etc. now have the ability to click on the thumbnail to view an inline preview of the file.
  3. Refreshed Visual Analytics UI and Color Scheme – Alongside the new Visual Analytics Overview tab, we also refreshed the other Usage & Analytics suite, as well as resolved a dozen-or-so related issues. Among other things, this includes improves aesthetics of the Contents tab and provides easier-to-read graphs.
  4. Performance Improvements to LMS Media Extensions – Re-factored the algorithms that the Media Choosers use to make them even faster when there are thousands of video objects in the Internal Library for a given user. While most users won’t notice the improvements, those power-users with thousands of video assets will certainly take note.
  5. Better Quota Management Capabilities including Self-Service Preview – Ability to send “approaching assigned quota” and “quota exceeded” emails when users are approaching or have exceeded their admin-allotted quota. We also now provide a way within the user’s My Account settings to view their current data usage.
  6. New Social Syndication Tab within Media Details – Improved workflow for Content Owners to cross-syndicate media to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube with API-level integrations with each Platform.
  7. Minor Improvements to Media Player – We added some minor improvements to the Media Player including in the scenario when the Thumbnail Bar is hidden. In this situation, when hovering over the scrubber bar, it shows the thumbnail for that region of the video.
• January 27, 2018

  United States Zone – Semi-Monthly RC20180126 Released

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. Please note that this release will be pushed to Canadian zones next week. This release is largely a maintenance update with about 60 smaller improvements including:

  1. Additional Administrative Alerts – Admin Panel’s Overview tab now provide alerts on newly-created automated schedules for hardware and software devices listed on the Devices tab.
  2. HTML5 Video Editor (Beta) Improvements – We’ve added further refinements to the UI, added the ability to zoom-in-and-out of the timeline, edit mobile captures, as well as edit uploaded (single-stream) media. We also added editing compatibility with media that has an Audio Description tag. Related to this, we also provided interim clarification on the purpose of each editor type while we work to consolidate them into the HTML5 Editor.
  3. Improved Email Filtering and Toggles – We now provide Administrators with toggle on-off capabilities on all emails sent to users. We also added the ability to customize additional email templates including Live Stream invitations.
  4. Media Chooser Improvements – Resolved some issues with the LMS Media Extensions related to displaying incorrect thumbnails in some rare cases, as well as, showing media on the EnterpriseTube that cannot be embedded.
  5. Small Updates to the Media Player – We refined the placement of a few less frequently used controls including the Indicate Confusion and Toggle Full-Screen buttons to be within the Options sub-menu.
• January 20, 2018

  Canadian and United Zones – Release RC20180119 – Minor Updates

  Canada Zone United States Zone

  This release resolves three issues that affected customers:

  1. Platform – Resolved issue with AST CaptionSync caption requests not being sent correctly in some cases.
  2. Software Station for PC – Resolved issue that occurs on PCs with extremely slow start-ups times (> 5 minutes) which could result in Windows Services failing to start. Software Station now can perform a delayed service start-up.
  3. Software Station for Apple – Clarified minimum installation requirements of YuJa Software Station for Apple. Now attempting to run the application will provide a clear error dialog indicating that MacOSX Version 10.10 (Yosemite) is required.
• January 13, 2018

  United States Zones – Semi-Monthly Scheduled Release Successfully Deployed

  United States Zone

  We have successfully pushed an update to all physical zones residing in the United States. This product release includes:

  1. New Admin Panel Overview Cards – We continue to add new administrative and system alerts to the Admin Panel’s Overview tab. We also added new Overview Cards on Views, Live Stream and Video Classroom activity.
  2. New Artificial Intelligence Captioning Engine – This new engine is faster and more accurate. With this new engine, during the course of 2018 we will be adding new functionality capabilities. One of those, we included with this release: the ability to automatically redact profanity in captions and transcripts.
  3. Improvements to HTML5 Video Editor – As we continue to transition away from our legacy Flash-based Video Editor, we have improved the overall fit of the HTML5 Video Editor including operation within LMS platforms. In our subsequent release, we will be adding improved timeline navigation and zoom capabilities. Our current target is full migration of all capabilities during this quarter and we are currently on-target.
  4. Improvement to Network Sensing Algorithm in Media Player – Our original network quality sensing algorithm that detected which bitrate to use was overly pessimistic on initial load when streaming on broadband networks. The new algorithm now makes a more intelligent decision resulting in a better quality initial streaming experience.
  5. Improved Server-Side Logging of RESTFul API Calls – For institutions developing custom applications with our RESTFul API, YuJa’s Professional Services team now has enhanced internal logging capabilities to assist customers with any debugging or assistance that their agreement with us includes.

  A total of 41 features, improvements, and fixes were released within this update. If you have questions on anything with this release, please do not hesitate to email support@yuja.com.