Whats new in KVS 5.4.0

In content import, importing feeds and grabbers there were several new features added:

1. Ability to specify compound wildcard expressions and regular expressions in terminology filters (previously it was only possible to specify individual words).
2. Ability to configure initial administrator's flag for the imported content. Admin flags are typically used to organize employee cooperation on the content, and missing ability to specify initial admin flag for the new content was a real issue in such scenarios.
3. In importing feeds we also added an option to import categories as tags, similar to the same option in grabbers. This is useful when you want to restrict feed from adding new categories, and instead add tags, that can further be used to correctly populate existing categories via categories auto-selection plugin.

Set of enhancements added specifically to grabbers:

1. Grabbers will not create multiple imports anymore; if older import from the same grabber didn't yet finish, the grabber's auto-pilot will wait for the next turn. Previously grabbers could clog many imports, if their auto-pilot was configured too often.
2. Grabbers API will now have support for user and comments data. For adding these new fields into specific grabbers please contact KVS support as this won't happen automatically.
3. Grabbers that support auto-delete will allow configure whether the deleted content should be fully deleted from KVS, or only marked as deleted.

Other enhancements:

1. We changed the way how background processes work in KVS. With the new approach, it will now be possible to track status of all background processes in Administration -> Installation info section. Another important change here is that plugins will be executed as individual processes and will work in parallel. Previously it was not possible to guarantee exact schedule for plugins, but now they will always be executed on time despite of any other factors.
2. A new plugin was added for integration with Neuroscore.ai, the brand new public API for using neural networks in various classification tasks. For now it only provides support for pre-selecting better thumbs, but we hope the number of features will be extended in future, as their development team is working with more functionality. If you use screenshot CTR rotator feature in KVS, you can find this plugin useful to make CTR rotation faster and more precise. It will work by sending all video screenshots to Neuroscore, which will in turn classify them and will allow removing bad-looking screenshots automatically. Then you can further use KVS rotator to find the best thumb from a smaller set of screenshots faster.
3. In video mass edit we added ability to truncate duration to the desired value for any set of videos. This could be useful when some videos are reported as violating DMCA due to their long duration; in this case you can use mass edit and truncate them to the allowed duration.
4. Another video mass edit feature is to allow retaining the same main screenshot number when re-creating overview screenshots for videos. Previously KVS would always reset main screenshot number to the default value specified in Content settings.
5. We decided to make a change in the logic that was used to set video initial duration. Previously KVS would always set duration from source file of the video, regardless of duration settings in video formats. Therefore it could result in cases, when all video formats are truncated to max 6 minutes, but video duration is set to 30 minutes, if you upload source file with such duration. The new behavior will prevent this and KVS will automatically set video duration to the biggest duration of its video formats.
6. In video format settings it will now be possible to specify the number of fragments in trailer settings bigger than 1 (one) even if duration limit is not set. It makes no sense to create trailer without limiting duration (trailer is when you take small fragments from several different video parts), however KVS lets you customize duration limit via content sources. You may want to not limit video duration by default, but create fragmented trailers with limited duration from videos from certain content sources (typically sponsored videos). This will be fully supported now.
7. Conversion servers will allow selecting which types of tasks should be assigned to specific conversion servers. This will provide more flexible way to manage conversion priorities, and make sure some type of tasks are executed with higher priority.
8. In VAST advertising settings we added support for sending categories and tags in VAST URL, providing more assistance to ad companies to render more contextual ads.
9. In Player settings you can now activate preload of all timeline screenshots.
10. Player GUI and skins will now support 4k indicator for such type of content.
11. Mass select feature was updated to allow exporting the selected content. This will allow you exporting a set of content by their list of IDs or URLs.
12. In admin panel we globally changed Content source selectbox with advanced searchable select control.
13. Paid access packages can now be limited to specific satellites if you are using primary paysite with multiple satellite paysites. Also we changed the confusing GUI of creating new access packages to be more straightforward.
14. Several enhancements added into Anti-spam feature. First, there were anti-spam settings added for feedbacks as well. Second, internal messages that are identified as spam will now be marked with spam flag and can be filtered in admin panel. Previously such messages were only visible to sender, but were automatically hidden from receiver, and it was not clear if they are indicated as spam, or not.
15. In Website settings it will now be possible to force KVS to append any additional parameters when doing 301 redirects. This is useful when you buy traffic and when some part of this traffic refer changed URLs that redirect to the newer content URLs. With the new option you can make sure that all traffic tracking parameters will also be considered in such redirects.
16. We added ability to revert user token awards. Reverting will deduct earned tokens from the user's account and if some of tokens were already spent inside KVS, KVS will rollback token spending where possible.
17. In embed profiles, it is now possible to specify which profile should be used by default when no HTTP referer is passed. Previously default embed settings were always used in such cases, however in some cases you may want default embed settings to be less restrictive. Please note that 3rd-party sites DO have technical ability to prevent sending HTTP referer when using your embed codes (which is not 100% supported by browsers though). If your default embed settings do not have full restrictions, such 3rd-party sites could be using your embed codes for free. For details please see Stats -> Embed usage and how many traffic you have for Empty referrer.
18. You can now search albums and videos that are marked as deleted by delete reason text in admin panel.
19. In theme SEO configuration in addition to [rand] structure we also added support for [pseudorand] structure. [rand] structure was designed to show random phrase from the set of listed phrases, which was guaranteed to be the same for the same text value. So that if you used "[rand]1 || 2 || 3[/rand] %tag%", the same tag name will always be prepended with the same random number from {1,2,3} set for all users and contexts, but different tag names will have different choice assigned to them. [pseudorand] has similar concept, but guarantees to have the same choice for the whole page URL rathen than text. This is specifically useful for multiple different texts on the same page if you want them ALL to have the same random choice selected, even if their text values are different. E.g. "[pseudorand]1 || 2 || 3[/pseudorand] video" and "[pseudorand]1 || 2 || 3[/pseudorand] movie" will be both rendered as "1 video" AND "1 movie", or "2 video" AND "2 movie", or "3 video" AND "3 movie" if they both are located on the same URL.
20. SMS billings, which were considered obsolete for the long time were finally removed from KVS. If for any reason you still use some of this obsolete functionality, you should not update.

Bugs that have been fixed:

1. [SEVERE] Advertising categories were not considered correctly (new in 5.3.0).
2. [SEVERE] Verotel payment processor did not process unlimited access packages correctly.
3. [MEDIUM] KVS didn't consider the necessity of video format pre- and post-rolls when re-creating video formats from other formats that could result in duplicate pre- and post-rolls added.
4. [MEDIUM] Anti-spam protection for internal messages worked incorrectly.
5. [MEDIUM] Player could hang if VAST advertiser supplied video ad with duration less than 1 second.
6. [MEDIUM] Manually uploaded videos could be not encoded well in some cases when attaching video pre-rolls.
7. [LOW] Exporting feed constructor didn't work correctly in Safari.
8. [LOW] It was not possible to delete timeline screenshots in KVS Basic packages.
9. [LOW] Grabbers didn't check for duplicate files and could create content that was rejected during conversion.
10. [LOW] Grabbers didn't allow importing categories as tags if they didn't support tags in general.
11. [LOW] Videos and albums marked as deleted didn't allow creating new content with the same title, if title duplicates were not allowed.
12. [LOW] Content publishing date could become well in the past when content processing took long time.
13. [LOW] In some cases video player in admin panel didn't have icons.
14. [LOW] Empty search did not reset the number of found items for this search query to zero, when nothing was found in the next iterations.