Azure Media Services Video Indexer release notes

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To stay up-to-date with the most recent developments, this article provides you with information about:

  • The latest releases
  • Known issues
  • Bug fixes
  • Deprecated functionality

December 2020

Video Indexer deployed in the Switzerland West and Switzerland North

You can now create a Video Indexer paid account in the Switzerland West and Switzerland North regions.

October 2020

Animated character identification improvements

Video Indexer supports detection, grouping, and recognition of characters in animated content via integration with Cognitive Services custom vision. We added a major improvement to this AI algorithm in the detection and characters recognition, as a result insight accuracy and identified characters are significantly improved.

Planned Video Indexer website authenticatication changes

Starting March 1st 2021, you no longer will be able to sign up and sign in to the Video Indexer website developer portal using Facebook or LinkedIn.

You will be able to sign up and sign in using one of these providers: Azure AD, Microsoft, and Google.

Note

The Video Indexer accounts connected to LinkedIn and Facebook will not be accessible after March 1st 2021.

You should invite an Azure AD, Microsoft, or Google email you own to the Video Indexer account so you will still have access.
Alternatively, you can create a paid account and migrate the data.

August 2020

Mobile design for the Video Indexer website

The Video Indexer website experience is now supporting mobile devices. The user experience is responsive to adapt to your mobile screen size (excluding customization UIs).

Accessibility improvements and bug fixes

As part of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility guidelines), the Video Indexer website experiences is aligned with grade C, as part of Microsoft Accessibility standards. Several bugs and improvements related to keyboard navigation, programmatic access, and screen reader were solved.

July 2020

GA for multi-language identification

Multi-language identification is moved from preview to GA and ready for productive use.

There is no pricing impact related to the "Preview to GA" transition.

Video Indexer website improvements

New search bar for deep insights search with additional filtering capabilities was added. Search results were also enhanced.

New list view with ability to sort and manage video archive with multiple files.

New panel for easy selection and configuration

Side panel for easy selection and user configuration was added, allowing simple and quick account creation and sharing as well as setting configuration.

Side panel is also used for user preferences and help.

June 2020

Search by topics

You can now use the search API to search for videos with specific topics (API only).

Topics is added as part of the textScope (optional parameter). See API for details.

Labels enhancement

The label tagger was upgraded and now includes more visual labels that can be identified.

May 2020

Video Indexer deployed in the East US

You can now create a Video Indexer paid account in the East US region.

Video Indexer URL

Video Indexer regional endpoints were all unified to start only with www. No action item is required.

From now on, you reach www.videoindexer.ai whether it is for embedding widgets or logging into Video Indexer web applications.

Also wus.videoindexer.ai would be redirected to www. More information is available in Embed Video Indexer widgets in your apps.

April 2020

New widget parameters capabilities

The Insights widget includes new parameters: language and control.

The Player widget has a new locale parameter. Both locale and language parameters control the player’s language.

For more information, see the widget types section.

New player skin

A new player skin launched with updated design.

Prepare for upcoming changes

  • Today, the following APIs return an account object:

    The Account object has a Url field pointing to the location of the Video Indexer website. For paid accounts the Url field is currently pointing to an internal URL instead of the public website. In the coming weeks we will change it and return the Video Indexer website URL for all accounts (trial and paid).

    Do not use the internal URLs, you should be using the Video Indexer public APIs.

  • If you are embedding Video Indexer URLs in your applications and the URLs are not pointing to the Video Indexer website or the Video Indexer API endpoint (https://api.videoindexer.ai) but rather to a regional endpoint (for example, https://wus2.videoindexer.ai), regenerate the URLs.

    You can do it it by either:

    • Replacing the URL with a URL pointing to the Video Indexer widget APIs (for example, the insights widget)

    • Using the Video Indexer website to generate a new embedded URL:

      Press Play to get to your video's page -> click the </> Embed button -> copy the URL into your application:

    The regional URLs are not supported and will be blocked in the coming weeks.

January 2020

Custom language support for additional languages

Video Indexer now supports custom language models for ar-SY , en-UK, and en-AU (API only).

Delete account timeframe action update

Delete account action now deletes the account within 90 days instead of 48 hours.

New Video Indexer GitHub repository

A new Video Indexer GitHub with different projects, getting started guides and code samples is now available: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/media-services-video-indexer

Swagger update

Video Indexer unified authentications and operations into a single Video Indexer OpenAPI Specification (swagger). Developers can find the APIs in Video Indexer Developer Portal.

December 2019

Update transcript with the new API

Update a specific section in the transcript using the Update-Video-Index API.

Fix account configuration from the Video Indexer portal

You can now update Media Services connection configuration in order to self-help with issues like:

  • incorrect Azure Media Services resource
  • password changes
  • Media Services resources were moved between subscriptions

To fix the account configuration, in the Video Indexer portal navigate to Settings > Account tab (as owner).

Configure the custom vision account

Configure the custom vision account on paid accounts using the Video Indexer portal (previously, this was only supported by API). To do that, sign in to the Video Indexer portal, choose Model Customization > Animated characters > Configure.

Scenes, shots and keyframes – now in one insight pane

Scenes, shots, and keyframes are now merged into one insight for easier consumption and navigation. When you select the desired scene you can see what shots and keyframes it consists of.

Notification about a long video name

When a video name is longer than 80 characters, Video Indexer shows a descriptive error on upload.

Streaming endpoint is disabled notification

When streaming endpoint is disabled, Video Indexer will show a descriptive error on the player page.

Error handling improvement

Status code 409 will now be returned from Re-Index Video and Update Video Index APIs in case a video is actively indexed, to prevent overriding the current re-index changes by accident.

November 2019

  • Korean custom language models support

    Video indexer now supports custom language models in Korean (ko-KR) in both the API and portal.

  • New languages supported for speech-to-text (STT)

    Video Indexer APIs now support STT in Arabic Levantine (ar-SY), English UK dialect (en-GB), and English Australian dialect (en-AU).

    For video upload, we replaced zh-HANS to zh-CN, both are supported but zh-CN is recommended and more accurate.

October 2019

  • Search for animated characters in the gallery

    When indexing animated characters, you can now search for them in the account’s video galley. For more information, see Animated characters recognition.

September 2019

Multiple advancements announced at IBC 2019:

  • Animated character recognition (public preview)

    Ability to detect group ad recognize characters in animated content, via integration with custom vision. For more information, see Animated character detection.

  • Multi-language identification (public preview)

    Detect segments in multiple languages in the audio track and create a multilingual transcript based on them. Initial support: English, Spanish, German and French. For more information, see Automatically identify and transcribe multi-language content.

  • Named entity extraction for People and Location

    Extracts brands, locations, and people from speech and visual text via natural language processing (NLP).

  • Editorial shot type classification

    Tagging of shots with editorial types such as close up, medium shot, two shot, indoor, outdoor etc. For more information, see Editorial shot type detection.

  • Topic inferencing enhancement - now covering level 2

    The topic inferencing model now supports deeper granularity of the IPTC taxonomy. Read full details at Azure Media Services new AI-powered innovation.

August 2019

Video Indexer deployed in UK South

You can now create a Video Indexer paid account in the UK south region.

New Editorial Shot Type insights available

New tags added to video shots provides editorial “shot types” to identify them with common editorial phrases used in the content creation workflow such as: extreme closeup, closeup, wide, medium, two shot, outdoor, indoor, left face and right face (Available in the JSON).

New People and Locations entities extraction available

Video Indexer identifies named locations and people via natural language processing (NLP) from the video’s OCR and transcription. Video Indexer uses machine learning algorithm to recognize when specific locations (for example, the Eiffel Tower) or people (for example, John Doe) are being called out in a video.

Keyframes extraction in native resolution

Keyframes extracted by Video Indexer are available in the original resolution of the video.

GA for training custom face models from images

Training faces from images moved from Preview mode to GA (available via API and in the portal).

Note

There is no pricing impact related to the "Preview to GA" transition.

User can choose to hide the gallery tab from the portal (similar to hiding the samples tab).

Maximum URL size increased

Support for URL query string of 4096 (instead of 2048) on indexing a video.

Support for multi-lingual projects

Projects can now be created based on videos indexed in different languages (API only).

July 2019

Editor as a widget

The Video Indexer AI-editor is now available as a widget to be embedded in customer applications.

Update custom language model from closed caption file from the portal

Customers can provide VTT, SRT, and TTML file formats as input for language models in the customization page of the portal.

June 2019

Video Indexer deployed to Japan East

You can now create a Video Indexer paid account in the Japan East region.

Create and repair account API (Preview)

Added a new API that enables you to update the Azure Media Service connection endpoint or key.

Improve error handling on upload

A descriptive message is returned in case of misconfiguration of the underlying Azure Media Services account.

Player timeline Keyframes preview

You can now see an image preview for each time on the player's timeline.

Editor semi-select

You can now see a preview of all the insights that are selected as a result of choosing a specific insight timeframe in the editor.

May 2019

Update custom language model from closed caption file

Create custom language model and Update custom language models APIs now support VTT, SRT, and TTML file formats as input for language models.

When calling the Update Video transcript API, the transcript is added automatically. The training model associated with the video is updated automatically as well. For information on how to customize and train your language models, see Customize a Language model with Video Indexer.

New download transcript formats – TXT and CSV

In addition to the closed captioning format already supported (SRT, VTT, and TTML), Video Indexer now supports downloading the transcript in TXT and CSV formats.

Next steps

Overview