CDS Videos – CDS | What's up on CDS

We’re excited to announce a set of powerful new features on CDS Videos! These updates make it easier than ever to upload, navigate, explore and share video content. Let’s dive in.

Video Chapters: Add and browse

Now CDS Videos supports video chapters. Chapters make long videos easier to explore, and let you create more structured videos. With chapters, you can divide your video into sections and viewers can easily follow the content and jump directly to any chapter.

If a video video has chapters, you’ll see clickable timestamps in the description and a “Chapters” section.
Clicking “View All” will open a side panel with all chapters listed.

You can:

Browse chapters and jump instantly.
See chapters directly in the video player.

How to add chapters to your video

If you want to add chapters to your video, all you have to do is to just type your timestamps and titles in the description, using one of the following format:

hh:mm:ss Title
mm:ss Title

The system will automatically detect these lines and create chapters for you.

Note: Make sure that the first timestamp starts with 00:00.

Video edit page: Add chapter timestamps to description

See the FAQ guide on adding chapters for more details.

Transcriptions: Follow and search

Like on YouTube, you can now follow and search transcriptions whenever a video has subtitles.

To open, click “Show Transcriptions” at the end of the description.

Published video page: Show Transcriptions button

The transcription side panel will open next to the player. You can:

Follow the video in real time.
Switch between available languages.
Jump to any moment by clicking on text.
Search across the transcription.

Published video page: Transcriptions side panel with search

How to enable transcription features

If you want to enable the transcription related features, just upload a subtitle file!

See the FAQ guide on transcriptions for more details.

Upload video files as additional files

Until now, you could only upload non-video files (e.g. PDFs, slides) as additional files.

With the new update:

You can upload video files as additional files.
Replacing the main video file is now handled separately, with a dedicated section.
This makes it easy to provide additional supportive video content in alongside the main video.

Video edit page: separate upload for main and additional files

Video page: download section for additional video files

Share videos from a specific time

Now you can share a link to your video starting at a specific time.

In the Share section of the published video, you can set the starting time (e.g. 05:32 or 01:12:45).
Copy and share the link, and the users will jump straight to that time when they navigate to your video!

Perfect for highlighting a key moment in a talk or lecture.

Login is available now for users without CERN account

Previously, only users with CERN accounts could log in to the platform and view restricted videos.

Now, users without a CERN account can also log in and watch restricted videos if they have permission. However they can’t upload or edit.

You can give access to view your restricted published videos to any user.

Video edit page: Restrict who can watch your video

This makes sharing restricted videos with collaborators outside CERN much easier.

Looking ahead

With these improvements, CDS Videos becomes more user-friendly and collaborative, while offering a modern experience familiar from mainstream video platforms.

Whether you’re uploading content, guiding viewers with chapters, enabling subtitles, or sharing key moments, these features help your audience connect and collaborate more easily.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand and improve CDS Videos.

User experience updates on CDS Videos

By Zacharias Zacharodimos

On August 12, 2024

In CDS Videos

We are happy to share some new updates about the CDS Videos platform. Our latest infrastructure upgrade introduces several improvements to enhance performance, security, and user experience. Here’s a summary of the key changes:

Upgraded search software

We’ve transitioned to OpenSearch, a central IT service that significantly boosts our search functionality and ensures a better integration with IT-provided services, removing maintenance’s redundancy.

Platform and security upgrades

We’ve upgraded our system from CERN CentOS 7 (CC7) to AlmaLinux 9 operating system. This change was part of the CERN campaign to upgrade all systems running on the former software as it is not actively supported anymore. This change ensures our platform’s resiliency and provides a more secure environment for all our users.

Improved upload features

Parallel uploads: We’ve addressed and resolved previous issues with multiple large parallel uploads. Uploading several large files simultaneously is now faster and more reliable.

Upload form improvements

We have made some changes in the upload form based on feedback we gathered from you. We hope they improve how you upload content on our platform.

Keywords: You can now enter keywords separating them with commas. That will allow you to paste e.g. “keyword1, keyword2” and the system will automatically convert them into 2 separate tags for you after pressing ENTER, improving the process of tagging and categorizing videos.

Date: We’ve enhanced the date input functionality to allow you to input dates directly instead of using always the date picker widget. That is useful when you want to input a rather old date.
Contributors:
- When you enter a custom contributor name, the system will convert the name automatically to a capitalized version e.g. “doe, joe” will be converted to “Doe, Joe“, ensuring a consistent appearance across the platform.
- We’ve added a new contributor role, “Subtitles by” so you can give proper credit to those who provide subtitles for your videos.

These upgrades are part of our continuous efforts to improve the CDS Videos platform. We hope these changes will provide you a better, more efficient experience.

Summer is over!

By Anika Churilova

On October 12, 2022

In CDS, CDS Videos, CERN Library Catalogue

Good and resting holidays and… new features!

New CERN SSO – cds.cern.ch

In September 2022, we have changed the integration from the old CERN SSO login to the new one. This was not only needed in relation to the upcoming decommissioning of the old SSO, but it also brings more security (enabling for example Two-Factor Authentication), more performance and more login possibilities. The recurrent login issues with external accounts are also solved.

In the coming weeks, we will also work to perform the same migration on CDS Videos.

InvenioRDM v10

We have now released InvenioRDM v10. Why is this important? Well, simply because it will be the base and the core software of the future CDS platform!

InvenioRDM v10 comes with support for custom metadata (necessary to store CERN specific fields, such as report number, experiments, accelerators, etc.), a new administration panel to make it easy to manage the instance and support for the new search engine OpenSearch. The latter will be necessary to comply with the standard CERN IT infrastructure.

In this last part of the year, the team will focus on creating a showcase version of the new CDS website, including a new look and feel and automatic deployments. This demo website will be useful to demonstrate features, test user experience and perform dry-run data migration from the current CDS to the new one in an iterative and progressive manner, to make sure that migrated data is correct.

CERN Library Catalogue

During the summer, we have made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes to the CERN Library Catalogue as well! To mention a few, book covers are now beautifully aligned and styled and the search for periodical and serial volumes now shows search tips.

In the context of InvenioILS, we also made it easier to create your own library catalogue website: with a couple of commands, users can set up a new instance and have a running website in a few minutes!

Progress before summer holidays

By Nicola Tarocco

On July 17, 2022

In CDS, CDS Videos

These first 6 months of the year 2022 have been quite busy. The CDS team focused on the development of InvenioRDM, the future research data management digital repository platform that will be the core of the future CDS version.

At the same time, production services need to be taken care of. While performing maintenance operations, we also worked on bug fixes and some technical features.

Future CDS platform – cds.cern.ch

With a small break of the development activities, we took half a day to discuss and define how we will kick off the new CDS platform: we came up with what we think will be a good strategy, and we hope to have the first dev/test instance by the end of the year, including a small subset of data migrated from the current CDS to the new one.

Even if it will be a long journey, we are very excited to get started!

InvenioRDM v9 and 9.1

The team contributed to the development of the latest 2 releases: InvenioRDM v9.0 and v9.1. These new releases enable curators to create their own communities of documents, to better self-organize content and make it easier for users to submit and find content. Each community is clearly identified, thanks to the new header with the name and the logo.

The way new documents are added to a community is managed via requests: when submitting a new document to a community, a new request is created where the submitted and the community’s curator can have a conversation with commenting. The request can be approved or rejected.

CDS Videos just got faster – videos.cern.ch

We have implemented a new feature in CDS Videos: the post-processing of uploaded videos got 2x faster! This is particularly visible when large video files are uploaded: the first two tasks, the extraction of the metadata, embedded in the video file, and the extraction of the video’s thumbnails now take half of the time.

Maintenance…

Databases for all the services have been upgraded to the latest versions, to ensure safety and security. The transcoding software, used in CDS Videos, have also been upgraded by our colleagues from the Webcast team, so that we can take advantage of the latest fixes and features.

On the 5th of July 2022, CDS suffered some slowness due to a very high amount of traffic, requesting some photos embedded in the CERN Home website. While being slower than normal conditions, the CDS website managed to serve more than a million requests, with a pick of 800 requests/second (thanks to connection queues).

While we are happy to see that our platform was up and running in such unusual conditions, we have identified some improvements, and we are working to change our infrastructure to be more performant when serving files.

What’s next

During summer, many absences are foreseen. The team will continue working on InvenioRDM v10: its features are critical to the future version of CDS. We are also planning to upgrade the web lectures player for an improved user experience when watching recorded talks, seminar or events.

Happy summer vacations! 🏖 ⛰ 🏜

New year, new…

By Karolina Przerwa

On January 19, 2022

In CDS, CDS Videos, CERN Library Catalogue

… features and improvements! In the last quarter of 2021 we have been busy as bees, preparing to kick off the 2022 with some big news. Read further to know about the details!

CDS Videos – videos.cern.ch 🎬

Following our plan for the Q4, we have introduced significant changes to the CDS Videos platform. You might not see it at the first glance, but the platform evolved “under the hood”.

Transcoding infrastructure and video processing 📺

Transcoding is one of the steps of the video processing performed after you upload your video file to the platform. The transcoding software is responsible for creating several predefined subformats for your video. These subformats are later used to provide improved streaming experience for anyone who is watching your video (after it is published).

The transcoding software previously used by CDS Videos was causing us and CERN users many headaches. Thanks to the collaboration with the CERN Webcast team, who provided the new video transcoding tool OpenCast as a service, we have worked very hard to integrate it. This new software is expected to have increased reliability and incomparable better performance.

We also took a good look into the rest of video processing steps and fixed the commonly reported issues. The processing will be now faster and more consistent – no more videos processing indefinitely in your “Upload” interface! 🎉

User experience tweaks

Last but not least, we have made a few improvements in the user interface, having in mind all the feedback we received from you. A few highlights:

We have reworked some explanation text to improve general understanding.

The authors and e-groups autocomplete has been improved, giving you access to powerful and more reliable users search – as broad as the CERN Phonebook!
The user and e-groups videos restrictions is now case-insensitive.
No more weird errors when publishing videos!

CERN Library Catalogue – catalogue.library.cern 📚

And what about the other applications? We worked on them as well!

CERN Library Catalogue’s latest version offers improvements in the user interface as well as librarian’s interface. We follow the latest standards on application security and data privacy, and as a result, we now provide user’s accounts and data anonymization. You can check details of our privacy policy here.

To make things easier, the identifiers in the book’s details page are now clickable.

Book page with external provider hyperlinks

Are you doing a lot of research? Are you in a dire need of articles and periodicals? Check the remodeled “Where to find” section of the periodical page.

Periodical page featuring physical volumes

Librarians’ tools

Our team has also worked on improving the librarians’ catalogue management tools. For example:

Better bulk import of e-books
Better export of catalogue’s object to CSV files
Search tweaks – case-insensitive searches and other

Web infrastructure upgrade 💻

Among of the many changes and enhancements, we had to upgrade the underlying web infrastructure for both services CDS Videos and CERN Library Catalogue.

Both platforms are now hosted on OKD4 cluster provided by our colleagues from Web Infrastructure team. The migration is a good news not only for our users, but also for our developers: the change helps us decrease the effort we have to make to maintain and deploy new code.

CERN Document Server – cds.cern.ch 📄

The last, but not least – CDS. Our biggest and oldest application is under heavy assessment process – we are reviving its features and conducting interviews with the main users to understand how you are using our services, and how we can evolve in the future.

What’s next?

In the first quarter, the whole team is joining the effort of developing InvenioRDM, which will be the foundation of the future CDS.

News, announcements and future developments of CDS services at CERN

Category: CDS Videos

🚀 New Features on CDS Videos: Searchable transcriptions, video chapters and more