The Avalon Media System team is proud to announce a new release, Avalon 7.7, which includes significant changes to the media player and a wide variety of improvements and bug fixes.

Ramp, a media playback and presentation component library designed for use with IIIF Presentation 3 manifests, replaces the existing MediaElement.js-based player. Also developed by the Avalon team, Ramp's components are now responsible for rendering almost all aspects of the item and playlist pages, and Avalon's IIIF manifest generation has also been enhanced in turn.

Upgrading will require a full reindex of your Avalon instance due to performance improvements introduced in 7.7. This release also includes Solr 9 support, and we recommended upgrading your version of Solr to 9.x along with 7.7 if possible. See the Upgrading Avalon 7.6 to Avalon 7.7 page for upgrade instructions and notes.

Notable Changes and Updates

• Ramp replaces the previous media player and most presentational elements on the Playlist and Item pages
• Application speed has been greatly improved on the Playlist and Item pages
• Multiple caption files can now be associated per media file, with language value assigned for each caption file
• New "Add to Playlist" form provides greater flexibility when adding media to playlists
• "Series" added as a new descriptive metadata field and is also indexed for faceting
• Improvements to accessibility that bring user-facing Avalon pages up to WCAG 2 Level AA conformance
• Transcripts can be marked as "machine-generated" to appear differently in the UI
• Previous and Next buttons added to the media player for easier navigation between sections
• Added checkbox to set auto-scroll property for transcript viewer
• Structural Metadata Editor now displays video when available
• Searching in the Timeline listing has been changed to allow for friendlier, fuzzier matching
• Changes to collection admin page forms for updating access control
• A new administrative facet allows filtering by item access level
• Many updates and additions to IIIF manifest generation
• IIIF Authentication removed from publicly accessible items
• Support for reCaptcha v3
• Support for Solr 9
• A new system script has been added to improve reindexing from Fedora

Avalon Media System 7.6 includes major upgrades for core dependencies Ruby and Rails, in addition to bug fixes and minor improvements.

Updates and Bug Fixes

• Updated to Rails 7 and Ruby 3
• Long filenames can now be viewed in full on the Manage Files edit page
• Fix for missing files in the Google Drive adapter for Browse Everything
• Updated build of the Structural Metadata Editor
• Bug fixes for the media player
• Minor updates to IIIF manifest generation

Avalon 7.5.1

The Avalon team is proud to announce release 7.5.1. Avalon 7.5.1 includes a variety of updates and bug fixes.

Updates and Bug Fixes

• Fix for issues selecting newly created segments in Timelines
• Timelines with custom scope on media files render as expected
• Transcript viewer now renders as expected when Controlled Digital Lending is disabled
• Fix for a track selection issue when the player is paused
• Long filenames can now be viewed in full in the Manage Files edit page
• Structural metadata now properly passed in API responses
• Filename handling improved for media files
• Updates for Rails and other dependencies

Avalon 7.4 provides significant updates to keep current with supported releases of core libraries and a small set of additional changes and bug fixes. For the code, see the Github release page.

Dependency Updates

• Rails 6
• Bootstrap 4
• Blacklight 7

Updates and Fixes

• Greatly improved performance for the Manage Users page
• Removing a user in Manage Users now removes the user from all system groups automatically

• Google Drive can now be used as a source alongside other filesystem options
• Increased sanitization and sanitization options for filenames during post-processing
• Remove Structure button now prompts for confirmation before removing structure data
• Default user session length reduced

Upgrade instructions are available on the Avalon documentation site.

Avalon 7.3 includes support for uploading files from Google Drive, a new component that allows users to view and download transcripts on the item page, and a variety of dependency updates and bug fixes. The release is available on Github at https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/releases/tag/v7.3.

Features

• Upload files directly from Google Drive
  • Google Drive can now be added a source for the Avalon Dropbox file picker
  • Update settings.yml with your Google OAuth 2.0 Client ID and secret to enable
• Transcript file download and viewer
  • Transcript documents can now be added to item sections
  • A transcript component will render on the item when a transcript document is present
  • Upload in VTT or or DOCX format to view the transcript on the item page
  • Users can download transcript files and click VTT timestamps to seek in the viewer
• Support for Google Tag Manager values for enhanced Analytics data

Updates

• Ruby 2.7 support
• Updated Docker build
• Dependency updates
• Better User Experience When Removing Captions
• Better resizing for the Advanced XML editor

Bug Fixes

• Fix for broken copy functionality on playlists
• Fix for file handling when a collection folder is missing or misnamed

Indiana University is looking for a skilled software engineering leader to manage the development team working on Avalon and other projects. For more information, or to apply, please see the job posting.

Avalon is looking for a skilled developer to join our team as a Software Engineer, either to work onsite at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana or remotely. For more information, or to apply, please see the job posting.