Technical innovations in VIMP 4.1

VIMP 4.1 contains many new features (see Changelog). However, it also contains extensive changes "under the hood", which contribute to improved PHP 7.2 compatibility and performance improvements.

Read all about the technological changes in the following:

New licence key for VIMP Corporate editions

With VIMP 4.1 a new license key must be entered after the update, if you're using VIMP Corporate Enterprise or VIMP Corporate Campus.

The new key can be retrieved in your personal account area under "Licenses". Of course, the content of this key does not change. But to ensure compatibility with PHP versions 7.2 and higher, it was necessary to regenerate the license key with a newer encryption method.

So please enter your new license key directly after the upgrade installation in order to keep VIMP running. The old keys will not work any more with VIMP 4.1.

Support of ABR

ABR stands for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and means that the streaming server automatically selects the best quality available at the current time from a selection of quality levels in order to play the video smoothly. The measurement is continuous and the selection adjusts seamlessly and without interruption according to the available bandwidth.

VIMP 4.1 supports ABR under HLS when using a streaming server (e.g. Wowza). If you already have a streaming server in use, you only need to activate ABR in the configuration and create the required SMIL files once. The SMIL files contain the format information for each video which will be provided to the streaming server.

CSS and JS file concatenation

Most CSS and JS files are concatenated starting with VIMP 4.1 to reduce the number of server requests.

What does this mean for your customizations?

Initially the concatenated files are delivered with the VIMP 4.1 installer or updater package. If you need to modifiy the CSS of VIMP, keep doing it like you always did by editing the style.css file and/or the CSS skin files (e.g. business.css). The difference now is, that you will not see your changes immediately, but only after you have re-built the concatenated CSS files. Those are named pacific.layout.min.css or atlantic.layout.min.css for example for the default templates.

Important: Don't modifiy those files directly, as they are being overwritten with the next npm command execution or with the next version update of VIMP!

To rebuild those files, you need to install npm/Node.js on your server. Please refer to this article on how to install it. Next, change to the templates folder and execute "npm run build", change back to the VIMP root folder and empty the cache with "./symfony cc". That's it! Now open VIMP in your browser and check your changes.

What, if you created your own template (which is strongly recommended for modifications in order to prevent overwriting with an update) or added custom CSS files?

In this case, please open the Grunt file (Grunfile.js) within the templates folder before running the npm command and add new lines for your own template or own CSS files analogous to the pacific and atlantic directives.

MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7.2 compatibility

VIMP 4.1 contains further optimizations for MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7.2 compatibility. If you're using MySQL 5.7, please read this FAQ article and adapt your MySQL config file accordingly.

For PHP 7.2 no further action is required and you directly benefit from the better performance of this version.

Performance optimizations

Thanks to extensive performance optimizations, we were able to reduce the page load time by around 30%. This is due to database query optimizations, a reduction in server requests, and improved caching behavior.

Furthermore, we have removed some plugins that are no longer needed in the current templates (Pacific and Atlantic) and were only included for compatibility reasons to the Classic template (that is no longer included since VIMP 4.0). In VIMP 4.1 we finally free these resources and reduce the loading times even further. The affected plugins are stTwitterSharePlugin, stGooglePlusButtonPlugin, stFacebookLikePlugin. Their functionatlities are obsolete in the Pacific and Atlantic templates.