KVS 5.3.0

30 November, 2020

Whats new in KVS 5.3.0

Conversion engine enhancements:

  1. Conversion engine will now support attaching pre-roll and / or post-roll fragments into video files. These can be configured in video format settings individually for each video format.
  2. When creating trailer files in fast skipping mode, conversion engine will check the result file duration and fallback to slow skipping in case of wrong trailer duration. Previously it could create trailers with wrong duration due to some ffmpeg issues.
  3. Conversion server will clean old tasks faster.
  4. It will be possible to configure default conversion priority separately for videos and albums. This could be useful for sites that have a big queue of new videos and albums uploaded by members. In this case KVS would typically give higher priority to videos, which are also processed more slowly. Increasing default conversion priority for albums will help them being processed faster.
  5. It will be possible to set automatic restarting of some failed background tasks up to several times. In some cases poor connection between servers could result in background tasks randomly failing, and usually restarting such tasks will complete them in the next iteration. This option can be activated in Content settings.

Several new features in manual import and feeds:

  1. All import validation messages are now grouped by their type, so that it will be much easier to have an outlook at them.
  2. Added ability to bulk update videos and albums via import GUI. The idea is that if you want to update certain values in many videos / albums, you can do their export into CSV first, then open it with Excel or similar editor and do any editing you need. Then import back into KVS in "update" mode. The only requirement is that you need to have ID column exported and imported back.
  3. Importing feeds will support RSS 2.0 format, that can provide video files.
  4. Exporting feeds will provide ability to configure filtering by admin flag.

Player settings enhancements:

  1. In skin selector it is possible now to deselect any skin, forcing played not to load any additional CSS files. This is intended for web optimization maniacs that may want to inline player CSS styles or include them into primary CSS file.
  2. In player settings everywhere where it was possible to connect advertising URL to content source URL field, it will now be also possible to use any of the content source's custom fields as well.
  3. We added ability to configure pre-roll advertising to start displaying after Nth video watched by user.

Other enhancements:

  1. Administrators will now see admin toolbar on each page generated by KVS. This toolbar highlights page structure and hierarchy, and is designed to simplify theme development and debug in addition to already available debug feature. The toolbar will also allow admins to activate block caching that could be helpful on huge projects with heavily-generated pages. Since caching is not activated for admins by default, it could take much time to fully generate each page from database and could make site navigation painful if you are logged in admin panel. This is when enabling block caching comes handy. Finally the toolbar will also provide quick navigation links to open editors for any video, or user, or other context object when you open them at site.
  2. Editing permissions for video and album editors were enhanced. For albums it was not possible to customize granulated permissions like for videos before, this was added in the new update. For videos we also extended permission list and added separate permissions to modify storage group, locked flag, video files and some other fields. Previously these actions were only possible with "Edit videos all data" permission. Also fixed a number of other issues in this area.
  3. New admin notifications feature started with some critical issues and warnings migrated to it. We noticed that admins very often ignore issues posted to start page of admin panel, however in most cases they indicate problems with your project. We want admins to put more attention to them, so they will now be highlighted in admin panel menus.
  4. Audit plugin will do better content validation and will allow filtering by issues of different types (for example, filtering videos that have issues with screenshots, or with video files). Previously content validation did not indicate type of issue, so separate filtering was not possible.
  5. Video and album editors will now allow updating custom flags. Custom flags are very specific customization functionality typically used for optimizing content filtering performance. In most cases KVS support will configure these flags to be automatically mass-updated based on categories, tags, or something else. However in some cases you may need to have ability to modify them individually.
  6. Admin panel GUI to monitor template changes and history was enhanced. We added advertising to the list of monitored changes and history, so that you will be able to revert to older advertising code if needed. We also added display of version number in every monitored editor to allow you quickly navigate to the version history of any template. And finally, in the list of unexpected changes we added ability to approve only part of them via checkboxes.
  7. Mass select (videos, albums) feature can now select objects using comma-separated list of IDs. Previously it was only possible to select by providing IDs each on new line, which was not convenient in some cases.
  8. Added ability to search users by IP, and also IP grouping was added in Stats -> Memberzone logins to see users that are using multiple accounts from the same IP address.
  9. Images in album editors will now display ID tag, so that you can easily find any specific image ID in the album. Also searching albums in admin panel can now search by image ID.
  10. Overload protection settings were moved from setup.php to Site settings section in admin panel. Their logic didn't change, but now you can alter them from admin panel and see explanations what are these settings for and how they can affect your site behavior.
  11. We added ability to configure individual memory limits for every site page in Website UI section. This could be useful for huge pages that display or load many data.
  12. All cookies set by KVS were updated to specify SameSite attribute, that will soon be required by all major browsers.
  13. For sites that use pseudo videos and redirect users to the actual videos on other sites, it is possible now to enable counting redirects connected with content sources in Outs stats. This means, if you have 100 pseudo videos referring to site A, you should make sure that they all have site A as a Content source field. Then KVS can count the number of visitors redirected to site A each day via these pseudo videos. This setting was added into Site settings, where pseudo video behavior is set.
  14. File uploads were protected against spamming to prevent disk usage leak.
  15. Text search was added to list_content_sources and list_posts blocks.
  16. Height and weight filters were added into list_models block.
  17. It is now possible to allow users to trigger their profiles being deleted without waiting confirmation from admins. The new setting was added into member_profile_delete block. It will allow you to choose, whether you want to allow all profiles to be auto-deleted, or only profiles without any uploaded content to be auto-deleted, or do not allow at all and handle manually.

Bugs that have been fixed:

  1. [SEVERE] Recreating multiple album formats for the same album worked incorrectly (new in 5.2.0).
  2. [SEVERE] The imported screenshots were ignored by new videos when having videos_sources directory moved to another disk partition (regression after 5.2.0).
  3. [SEVERE] New 5.2.0 features in VAST profiles were not fully working in embed codes (new in 5.2.0).
  4. [MEDIUM] Resizing video watermarks for vertical videos didn't work correctly in some cases (new in 5.2.0).
  5. [MEDIUM] Serving 404 error for empty searches in some cases could result into 200 status response due to caching.
  6. [MEDIUM] Behavior of skip_xxx filters in all blocks was fixed to a more correct way. E.g. you have list_videos block configured to skip all videos with Category 1, but this filtering was not in effect when displaying videos by Category 2, or by Category 3, or by any other category. The new behavior will display all videos from Category 2 that do not have Category 1.
  7. [MEDIUM] Changing grabber settings in admin panel could be reverted by grabber background task.
  8. [MEDIUM] Model auto-selection plugin was not working correctly with PHP 7.3+.
  9. [MEDIUM] Some VPAID advertising features didn't work in iframe embed codes.
  10. [LOW] Images in album editor were not displayed correctly (new in 5.2.0).
  11. [LOW] Admin panel incorrectly displayed content scheduling on start page for "today" date.
  12. [LOW] It was not possible to use FTP links in content import.
  13. [LOW] Grabbers could create content with empty titles.
  14. [LOW] Avatar generation plugin didn't start re-generation immediately if asked, was waiting for cron signal.
  15. [LOW] Uploading new source file into video didn't reset its duplicate key.
  16. [LOW] In some server configurations primary PHP process would wait for all child processes to finish.
Zupełnie nowy KVS 6.2.1 jest już dostępny Zamów teraz