Tag: tobira

We are happy to announce the next major version of Opencast’s video portal: Tobira 3.0! We added many new features, improvements and bug fixes since the 2.0 release in May 2023. This blog post will summarize all changes since then, not only the ones in 3.0 itself.

As you can see, Tobira has a dark mode now which is automatically used based on your system settings. The font family used by Tobira can also be configured now, allowing you to more closely match your organization’s CI. And while the main design is the same as in 2.0, the UI is continuously improved and polished.

Apart from design changes, many new features were added. For example, the main search was majorly reworked and is now more powerful. In particular: it allows you to search through subtitles and slide texts of videos, which means you can find videos by their contents, not only their metadata. Try it out for yourself.

Tobira now supports Opencast playlists, offers basic Matomo support and makes it possible to protect videos via password. Users can now delete their own videos as well as change the videos’ access policy. The same ACL editor can be used to set an access policy when uploading videos and to give granular editing permissions to different pages in the video portal.

Tobira’s player (a version of the Paella player) now uses a new design, allows users to switch between qualities of progressive download videos, works well for portrait videos and shows video segments with slide previews.

On the technical side:

• The authentication system was reworked and is now more flexible and powerful (especially due to the addition of auth callbacks).
• The Opencast workflow for videos uploaded through Tobira can be configured.
• Our GraphQL Library was updated, also bringing a newer GraphiQL version.
• Various performance improvement, like bundle splitting and rendering optimization were implemented

Of course, this blog post only gives an overview. There are countless other bug fixes, improvements and many other features! Be sure to check out the release notes of v3.0 and all previous ones.

We are very happy to finally announce the first release of Tobira, the Opencast video portal!

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, manage videos, and more.

It’s possible to connect Tobira to virtually any authentication system and integrate it into your university’s/organization’s infrastructure. The logo and the colors are also customizable (to some degree) so that you can get close to your organization’s CI/CD.

It runs as its own web application and is designed to still function when Opencast is unreachable (as long as the static files, e.g. videos, are still being delivered). It constantly synchronizes data with Opencast. In order to do that, Opencast must have the Tobira module loaded. Currently, that module is still developed in its own fork of Opencast, but we hope to bring it into the community version soon.

While there is still a long way to go to fully meet our ambitions and goals regarding Tobira, we now think that it is already useful. Starting with v1.0, we provide an easy upgrade path from one version to the next. In particular, we promise not to break your database, which we think you will appreciate! For more information on all this, please read our versioning policy documentation.

To find out more, please checkout the README file and the docs/ folder. That documentation should contain all information you need to setup your own Tobira.

Tobira is developed by ELAN e.V., with the majority of the funding provided by the ETH Zürich, and additional funding coming from Bern University.