Technical innovations of VIMP 5.5

With VIMP 5.5 you get an extensive update that brings great new features as well as a significant performance improvement (see changelog). We describe the most important technical innovations here on this page.

System requirements

Please note the system requirements. There have been changes to VIMP 5.4. Support for PHP 7.1 - 7.3 is no longer available with this release. Instead PHP 8.2 is supported as a new version. So VIMP 5.5 runs with PHP 7.4 - 8.2.

SourceGuardian Loader

The SourceGuardian Loader must be installed at least in version 14.0 to install VIMP 5.5.

Video Editor V4

VIMP Video Editor

VIMP 5.5 includes a completely new Video Editor, which initially provides you with the following functions:

  • Trim videos (beginning / end / at any point).
  • Support for multiple tracks
  • Merge multiple videos
  • Mute audio
  • Save / load projects

In order for users to be able to use Video Editor V4, your user roles must be granted the necessary permissions in the roles and permissions management.

We will continue to expand the range of functions successively. You can run Video Editor V3 and V4 in parallel, should you use functions of V3 that are not yet included in V4.

Group roles

Analogous to the channel roles, VIMP 5.5 gives you the option to assign roles for group users as well. This allows you to assign members e.g. administration rights or further roles with graded permissions.

The available group roles are:

  • Viewer: no editing rights
  • Member: may add own media
  • Moderator: may administrate media of other users
  • Administrator: may additionally edit settings of the group

Approval list

Media approval

Users authorized to share media now receive a clear list of all media to be shared in the frontend. If media are available for release, a new icon appears in the header bar, which can be used to call up the list.

Configuration value changes

  • The WebM and WebP formats have been added to the allowed default formats for media uploads. If you do not want this, you can remove both of them in the configuration. The change takes effect only for installations where the shared file formats have not yet been edited.

  • Chapter markers are now activated when the minimum preset is applied.

  • The category filters on the media pages in the frontend are automatically activated from now on. If you do not want this, you can deactivate them again via the configuration.

Performance improvements

By changing the delivery of Javascript files and optimizing the delivery of the Video.js player, the page load time could be improved by up to 50%.

New parameters for the update task

For installations with a large number of media, updating to a new version can sometimes take a long time. This is due to the recalculation of statistics and the checking/correction of file permissions.

The update can be accelerated from now on by adding the following parameters to the update command:

--permissions=yes/no
--recalculate=yes/no

If these parameters are set to "yes", the corresponding steps are skipped and can be started at a later time, for example.

Accessibility optimizations

Several areas were improved again in terms of accessibility.

New housekeeping features

The following additional housekeeping functions are available from VIMP 5.5:

  • Task to delete orphaned upload files
  • Task to delete media that are older than X days
  • Task to delete users who are inactive for more than X days

New cronjobs

The following cronjobs are now available:

./symfony framework:uploads-housekeeping

Deletes all orphaned files in the upload directory that are older than 24 hours.

./symfony framework:media-housekeeping

Permanently deletes all media older than X days (default: 2 years).

Possible parameters:

  • --days=xyz
  • --exclude-special=yes/no (excludes medium on the startpage, if there is one configured)
./symfony framework:users-housekeeping

Permanently deletes all users who are inactive for more than X days (default: 2 years).

Possible parameters:

  • --days=xyz
  • --exclude-admins=yes/no

API changes

  • The API method "search" now also contains results for playlists.

  • The API method "loginUser" also contained results of non-shared users when using a master token.

  • The API method "loginUser" now also passes the processing in case of a non-existing user to the corresponding authentication provider (e.g. LDAP or SAML), so that the user can be created via this if necessary.