With the 5.10 release, a new transcode system is introduced.
The new transcode system has been written from scratch and is much easier to configure than the old transcode system. The main capabilities of the new transcode system are described here.
When upgrading existing environments to 5.10, the new transcode system is automatically used as much as possible. The old transcode system can still be used in 5.10 but will be deprecated in later releases. Thus, it is highly advised to fully use the new transcode system instead of the old transcode system as soon as possible.
This page describes the main things to be aware of in relation to the migration to the new transcode system.
Automatic migration
When upgrading to 5.10, as many old media formats as possible are automatically migrated to new formats. In particular, a new format with the same name as the old format is created, and then the old format is mapped to the new format. This is only done for old media formats that can be mapped to a supported format type in the new transcode system. Please contact RnD if you have a use case for a format type that is not supported in the new transcode system.
An overview of all formats can be seen in the system administration page in the Media Manager. If a format is mapped to an old media format, this can be seen in the “Mapped media formats” parameter when viewing the details of a format.
When an old media format is mapped to a new format, please be aware of the following:
All changes to the old media format are ignored.
Renditions are no longer generated based on profiles. Thus, if renditions of the old media format were previously being generated when an asset was published to a specific channel folder, this is no longer the case. Pre-generation can be set up for the new format. However, please carefully consider if this is necessary now that the transcode system supports on-demand transcoding.
The old format is no longer visible in the download dialog even if it has been configured as visible in the download qualities settings.
Existing renditions are not re-generated. Thus, the existing renditions will be used when requesting renditions of existing assets in the new format. This is also the case if generating the rendition with the new format definition would lead to a different rendition than the existing rendition.
For new assets, the new transcode system and the new format is used to generate renditions. This is also the case if a rendition of the old media format is requested.
Renditions of the format can still be requested with the id of the old media format. This is mainly relevant for backward-compatibility reasons.
New thumbnail formats
With the 5.10 release, the thumbnail and preview formats that are defined out of the box have been reworked. By default, this is handled automatically and no manual actions are required.
The main difference between the old and the new thumbnail formats is that they are now webp files with transparency. The old thumbnails were jpeg files without transparency.
As described above, the thumbnails for existing assets are not automatically re-generated. If the existing thumbnails should be re-generated, this can be done by setting up an automation that uses the “Generate asset renditions” step with the “Force generate” flag enabled.
Since the file type of the thumbnails has been changed, the asset streamer returns the response header Content-Type: image/webp instead of the correct response header Content-Type: image/jpeg for existing thumbnails. Most browsers should be able to display the thumbnails despite of this. If it becomes an issue, the existing thumbnails can either be re-generated as described above, or the thumbnail format can be changed back to be jpeg.
Things to be aware of
After updating to 5.10, at most 200 new old media formats can be created. If you need to create an old media format after upgrading to 5.10, please reach out to RnD to share your use case. Ideally, the new transcode system should be able to accommodate your use case.