April 2024 - Updates and Release Highlights

Release Notes
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Here’s our April monthly roundup of updates and highlights from our releases, including new features, fixes, UX improvements, and guides.

Player

  • iOS & Android: Introduced the Bitmovin Advertising Module as an alternative to using Google’s IMA SDK for playing back VAST ads. The Bitmovin Advertising module is fully GDPR-compliant and enables additional functionality such as programmatically skipping ads or support for the visionOS platform. Read more in our Getting Started Guides for iOS and Android.
  • iOS: Support for WebVTT coloring information (text and background colors) for side-loaded WebVTT subtitles and WebVTT subtitles referenced in the manifest.
  • Web: Introduced seekbarSnappingEnabled flag in the UIConfig to enable play head snapping to timeline markers on the seek bar when seeking near them as well as UIContainerConfig.hideImmediatelyOnMouseLeave to immediately hide the UI when the mouse leaves it.

Also check out the full release notes for Web, iOS, Android, Roku, React Native and Flutter as well as our Developer Documentation.

Analytics

  • HTML5: The HTMLVideoElementAdapter has a couple new additions. First, we added a new field sessionMetadata that provides functions to change language specific information about the current playback. There’s also a new optional argument for source metadata to provide more fields that we can’t get from the video element.

Check out the Analytics collector release notes for Web, Android, iOS, Roku.

VOD Encoder

  • UX: Encoding name is now included in triggered event messages, making it easier to correlate events when running multiple concurrent VOD encodings.
  • HDR/SDR: New warning messages when invalid or unspecified color properties are detected (color space, color range, color transfer, color primaries). Also corrected the VIDEO-RANGE attribute in HLS manifests for Dolby Vision to SDR conversions.
  • Azure: New and improved guide for setting up Bitmovin Cloud Connect with your Azure account.

Live Encoder

  • UX: Encoding name is now included in triggered event messages, making it easier to correlate events when running multiple concurrent live encodings.
  • Azure: We added metadata to prevent live manifests from being cached and set the correct mime type for live manifests when uploading them to Azure Outputs.
  • API: We now offer a reset timeshift option, which can be used to provide a new first frame in the manifest and purge all previous segments. This can be used to support a “Preview” mode before going Live, or for creating Program DVR only points during a 24/7 linear broadcast.

Live and VOD Encoding release notes are available here.

Platform

  • Visibility: Added new endpoints to query all webhook notifications when manifest generation finishes successfully or errors.
  • UX: Improved stream key related error messaging for Live Encoding and added a new API endpoint for unassigning stream keys.

Full REST API platform release notes are available here.