Programmable Media release notes: April 16, 2024

Cloudinary Programmable Media release notes are published periodically and give you a quick overview of all the new features, enhancements, and fixes that have been recently released for Cloudinary developers. When relevant, they may also give sneak previews of upcoming features and/or other important announcements.

New features

Dynamic object tracking layers for videos

Check out this new cutting-edge feature that enables you to add image or text layers on videos, and allow Cloudinary to dynamically adjust their positions throughout the video based on advanced AI object/people detection alongside intelligent video object tracking.

This innovative functionality offers a new dimension to video customization, providing a powerful tool for developers, marketers, content creators, and businesses looking to deliver more engaging and targeted visual experiences.

Elevate your video content by integrating relevant overlays that dynamically adapt to the objects in focus, creating a more personalized and visually compelling viewer experience. With dynamic positioning, the layer not only tracks the object’s movement but also elegantly appears and disappears in sync with the object’s presence in the frame.

Video Player karaoke-style word highlight

You can now optionally enable word highlighting for your Video Player paced subtitles to show exactly when each individual word is spoken in the video, just like karaoke.

Word highlighting is gaining increasing popularity, especially in social media, online how-to, and step-by-step videos due to its ability to capture viewers' attention and add to storytelling and visual interest.

You can configure the styling for the highlighted words alongside other subtitle styling options for fonts, colors, etc., to ensure maximum readability and reinforce brand identity.

For example:

Check out the word highlighting in action on one of our Dev Hints Youtube Shorts below.

 

Learn more: Video Player subtitle word highlighting

iOS sample app

A brand-new sample app is available for the Cloudinary iOS SDK. The app demonstrates a variety of capabilities, including:

• Uploading, including uploading large files and fetch upload
• Optimization
• Transformations
• Delivery
• Video, including the video player widget and video feeds
• Upload widget and image widget implementations
• Use cases such as localization, branding, and background normalization

Below are just a few sample screens from the app. We invite you to fork or clone, run, and start playing with the app yourself: iOS Sample App github repo

Let us know what you think!

Enhancements

New design for Video Player studio

Introducing a fresh design for the video player studio in the Cloudinary console. The enhanced tab organization facilitates improved control over player behavior, appearance, and general settings.

We've also added a new Video Configuration page in the Console that you can use for configuring the behavior of a specific video source, including the setup for chapters, subtitles, titles, descriptions, and more.

Simplified feature docs navigation

The Programmable Media Guides menu in the doc site has been simplified. It's now divided into just four primary feature areas:

• Upload
• Transform and customize
• Optimize and deliver
• Manage and analyze

It additionally contains cross-functional use-case guides that explain how to take advantage of features from all the above categories, specifically for Video, AI, or Native mobile as well as a dedicated Add-ons section.

We hope this will make the docs navigation cleaner and help you to more quickly discover and understand the features and use-cases available for your media management and delivery needs.

Improved experience for adding users to your account

When your account hits the max number of users allowed for your free or paid plan, a pop-up dialog box enables you to define or purchase more users directly from that screen. You can also access this dialog box to add users at any time via the Invite New Users button in the left sidebar of the Cloudinary Console.

sp_auto support in EU and AP data centers

When initially introduced, automatic streaming profile selection (sp_auto) for adaptive bitrate streaming was available only for accounts based in our default US data centers. sp_auto is now supported in all data centers and regions. If your account is using our EU or AP data centers, we invite you to start taking advantage of sp_auto to optimize your video deliveries.

Announcements

New Android SDK self-paced course in the Cloudinary Academy

In this 35-minute, multi-lesson course, Jen Brissman shows how Android developers can upload, transform, and optimize images and videos in their apps. You can use our sample application and its open-source code to explore the native video player and effortlessly integrate image loaders for seamless asset downloading.

Enroll for the free Android SDK course

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