Opencast 16.0 and 16.1

We are happy to announce that Opencast 16 has been released as planned on June 12, 2024. The new release is another push in modernizing and simplifying our architecture and infrastructure. But it also comes with new features and is yet another push towards updating our user interfaces.

Some highlights of Opencast 16 are:

• The new admin interface got lots of improvements during the recent Opencast “BugBash.” Over 30 admins and developers came together to identify problems with the new interface and fix them. With over 60 fixes, this improved the usability a lot but also caught a few hidden bugs that could have had larger consequences.
• Playlists are now supported in Opencast and can be used in integrations like LMS plugins or the video portal. Playlists can be used to group and sort recordings. Unlike series, the same video can be part of several playlists.
• The search index infrastructure was simplified and modernized. Opencast no longer uses Solr, but now uses OpenSearch across all the cluster nodes. This is not only great to make the project structure easier to understand, but also means that we were able to remove a component with lots of known security vulnerabilities which now don’t have to be mitigated any longer.

Opencast 16 will be supported for one year, until the release of Opencast 18. It will get monthly maintenance releases.

Thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible!

Opencast 16.0

Opencast 16.1
 

Most importantly 16.1 fixed a bug that made it impossible for Opencast 16 to
work on clustered systems!