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 R&D 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.
Qualities are no longer generated based on profiles. Thus, if qualities 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.
Existing qualities are not re-generated. Thus, the existing qualities will be used when requesting qualities of existing assets in the new format. This is also the case if generating the quality with the new format definition would lead to a different quality than the existing quality. As described in https://digizuite.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DD/pages/3708157997/DC+5.10+Breaking+changes+-+Transcode+system#New-thumbnail-formats, it is possible to use the “Generate asset renditions” automation step to force existing qualities to be re-generated.
For new assets, the new transcode system and the new format is used to generate qualities. This is also the case if a quality of the old media format is requested.
Qualities of the format can still be requested with the id of the old media format. This is mainly relevant for backward-compatibility reasons.
Configuration Management
All new formats that have been created as part of the automatic format migration, described above, will appear as delete actions when diffing in configuration management. Furthermore, all member groups that had one of these old formats configured as a download quality will have an update action, updating the download qualities to the corresponding new formats.
Please ensure that these update and delete actions are exported into a custom layer before applying the configuration.
Revisit formats
Although not strictly necessary, the introduction of the new transcode system provides a good basis for revisiting the formats that are defined for existing customers. Maybe some of the old media formats are no longer needed. Maybe some of the automatically mapped formats can be mapped better manually, for instance utilizing the support for webp and transparency.
When revisiting the available formats, please keep an eye out for the following:
Are there any used media formats that have not been manually mapped to a new format?
This can happen if the new transcode system does not support the type of the media format. If you encounter such a case, consider if one of the supported format types in the new transcode system can be used instead. Otherwise, reach out to R&D to share your use case.