This page is a summary of the most relevant changes of the current version of Ventuz Director for existing users. For a detailed list of new features, changes and bug fixes, see the official release notes.
Ventuz 7.01
Published Scenes: Added filtering capabilities to the Published Scenes dialog.
Ventuz 6.12
Playlist: new Button in Playlist Control to add an "All Out" item which performs a Take Out of all items on the current channel.
Ventuz 6.10
Shows: Recent Shows displayed on start screen can now be removed by clicking the upper right button on the show icon.
Asset Browser: Added new Asset Browser filters "Data", "Geometries" and "Sounds/Audio".
Playlist: Added a new column for thumbnails of items to Playlist window.
Macro List Window: Added new dockable window for Macros list, so they can be executed without shortcut via double-click.
Ventuz 6.09
Plugin API: Added DisplayName property of Channel interface
Plugin API: Improved Plugin API by extending Playlist, Channel and Drag & Drop capabilities.
Remoting API: Introducing Remoting API (Websocket and REST). See Director Remoting documentation for further information.
Ventuz 6.08
New Shortcuts: Added new shortcuts "Preload all Templates", "Preload all Templates in Playlist", "Preload all Templates on Timeline" and "Reload all Templates".
Ventuz 6.05
Macros: Added Macros capabilities, which allow triggering of predefined actions via shortcuts, like cueing a specific Template or modifying a Project Data value.
Reload all Templates: Added "Reload all Templates" option to menu which forces the Runtime to first unload and then load all templates of current project.
Import/Export Window Layouts: Added import and export of window layouts to the Layout Manager.
Disable Channel Rules: Added possibility to disable a Channel Rule using the Channel property window.
Topology: Treat errors as warning option to keep it operational even in the event of errors.
Ventuz 5.01
Playlist: The Playlist has a new toolbar to rearrange and delete items. Within the playlist it is now possible to play backwards by enabling the Reverse-Mode. A Default Duration can be configured that is inherited by every new created item and the playlist can auto-follow to keep always the active item in the view.
Properties: The Numeric Up Down is improved to fit the behavior of Ventuz Designer.
Plug-In API: has been extended to expose playlist interfaces that allow to create, modifiy and delete playlist items.
Ventuz 4.06
Localization: The user interface can now be switch to use German/Chinese text via the application options. As a side effect, giving a dockable window is now an optional feature. By default, the window's name will be empty and Director will use a label based on its type (e.g. "Properties" for the property editor) to support switching labels when the localization changes.
The Plug-In API has been extended to expose a timeline item's status (e.g. cued, on-air) and plug-ins can now read a channel's preview, cue and on-air item. The counter-part to CueAsync called UncueAsync has been exposed such that a plug-in can now clear the cue. The plug-in section in the user manual has been extended to list the supported URI schemes (which are for example require to assign images to template data).
Ventuz 4.05
Director can manage multiple channels of content and a topology cluster supports addressing multiple ports. This enables a multitude of scenarios from multiple layers of content on a single machine (e.g. background, foreground, overlay) to having separate content on different machines that belong to a single show. Channels are added and connected to channel slots in the topology via the Channel Manager in the main menu. Channels can be deactivated to not listen to user interaction but still run their predefined playlists via the timeline window.
Channels can be activated by pressing Ctrl + 1 to Ctrl + 9 (or Ctrl + Shift + 1 etc to keep the previous selected channels active as well).
All playlist and property editor windows as well as the timeline window now have optional take/update/clear buttons per channel that can be added to their toolbars via their docking window configuration pop-ups.
Each channel can now have a set of channel rules to restrict which content can be cued on any particular channel. For example, full-screen movies can automatically appear only on the background channel while branding information is routed to the overlay channel. Channel rules also allow to replace content being cued by channel specific versions, for example replacing all usage of a sponsor template with a dedicated pre-filled sponsor page.
All channel-based windows (e.g. property editor, playlist and plug-in windows) now show the name of the bound channel underneath their tab-label.
The plug-in API has been extended such that plug-ins can now directly be associated with a show via the Show / Plug-ins main menu entry. Enabled-plug-ins are loaded when the show opens and their configuring is stored in the show file. However, similar to window layouts, project specific defaults can be embedded into the VZP file. The Ventuz Visual Studio extension has been updated to include the new interfaces:
IChannelRuleProvider: add custom condition and actions for channel rules. One interesting use case is doing database lookups when specific templates (such as statistics) are cued.
IConfigurablePlugin: Such plug-ins have a configure settings button next to their entry in the plug-in manager and their settings are stored in the show file.
IShotboxExtender: add custom entries to the shot box
IWindowProvider/IPluginWindow: replaces the older IWindowPlugin interface and allows to provide multiple window types from within a single plug-in as well as develop channel-dependent windows. The existing IWindowPlugin interface still works but is now obsolete and will be removed in a future version. Plug-in developers should switch to the new interfaces!
Topologies can now be embedded into a Ventuz project file via the Embedded Topology main menu entry. When a show is opened, it checks the underlying project and shows a selection dialog if the project contains embedded topologies.
Ventuz 4.04
Ventuz Director officially became a multi-machine solution with the introduction of the Topology Editor. It is a simple and elegant user interface for creating an environment of remote machines (e.g. one or more cluster of playout machines) that are controlled by Director but also can be used for monitoring and performing basic administrative tasks.
Creation of a Director Show and managing multiple shows based on the same project has been vastly improved. Auto-Templates and Scene Import Information is now stored in the Ventuz Project File (.vzp) to be consistent among all shows. Window Layouts are also no longer stored in a show. Instead they are stored in the user settings on a per-project basis but can also be bundled into the Ventuz Project File for deployment. All of this combined makes creating a new show as simple as selecting a project from the project browser!
A Window Layout can now contain multiple instances of type Property Editor, Preview Renderer and Playlist. To what data source they are bound can be changed in the window manager.
Director has a new Tools main menu which contains the options menu entry. In it, various start up options like fullscreen and default topology can be set. See Application Settings for more.
The default order of preview/program windows has been changed such that the preview window is on the left. Note that this only affects projects for which no window layouts are stored in the user settings when a show is opened and only shows create in V4.04.