Tobira 2.0 released

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Screenshot of Tobira Test Deployment with Best Open Cat Videos as example.
May 16, 2023

We are very happy to announce Tobira 2.0, the first major version after Tobira’s initial release in July last year. A lot has happened since then!

Tobira aims to be a pleasant interface through which users interact with your Opencast content. It lets you present videos and series in a customizable, hierarchical page structure, but also makes it easy for users to search through all media. Additionally, it offers tools to upload and manage videos. It’s possible to connect Tobira to virtually any authentication system and integrate it into your university’s/organization’s infrastructure.

The main changes in the 2.0 release include an extensive design refinement, user pages, being able to upload videos into series, a better share menu, a revamped color system, and a large number of accessibility improvements. User pages allow users (who are allowed to) to create and manage their own pages that are independent of the main page structure. The design changes don’t include anything major and the layout certainly stayed the same, but everything looks a lot tidier now.

You can read the full changelog of v2.0 on GitHub’s release page.

But there are 7 additional releases between 2.0 and 1.0, which brought a large number of features and improvements as well. The most notable ones are:

  • Properly support live-streams
  • Make videos nicely embeddable
  • Add subtitles support
  • Vastly improve documentation
  • Add metrics endpoint (e.g. for Prometheus)
  • Improved series & event block editor
  • Pre-authenticating users for Studio and Editor
  • Collapse/hide multiple upcoming events
  • Ease first-time setup considerably
  • And much much more!

And there are no signs of development slowing down!

As usual, we would like to thank all institutions which make Tobira possible by funding its development. This is primarily the ETH Zürich which is the project’s primary patron and has been from the very start. We are also very grateful for the significant contributions by Bern university and the TU Wien.

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