Azure AI Video Indexer release notes

  • Article

Revisit this page to view the latest updates.

To stay up-to-date with the most recent Azure AI Video Indexer developments, this article provides you with information about:

  • The latest releases
  • Known issues
  • Bug fixes
  • Deprecated functionality

March 2024

Object detection of weapons

Azure AI Video Indexer now detects weapons. The weapons class includes hand guns and rifles. For the limitations of the weapons class under Specific class notes object detection documentation.

February 2024

AMS-less accounts and migration guidance

  • All new VI account video packaging, streaming, and encoding is performed by VI, and you will no longer be able to create AMS-based VI accounts. See the new account create guide.
  • VI encoding/packaging is billed at a flat rate of 1 cent per minute with free streaming.
  • You can update your VI accounts from AMS-based to the new AMS-less account type.
  • You can opt in to have your AMS VI assets reprocessed and migrated by VI, so you can continue to access your videos and insights. The migration will begin in late March.
  • Video Indexer webapp and widgets use a new media player that is highly performant and no longer use Azure Media Player.

The following documentation guides you through the account and asset migration process:

TLS1.3 support

We support TLS 1.3, the latest version of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which encrypts data to provide a secure communication channel between two endpoints.

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in the Sweden Central and US West3

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the Sweden Central and US West3 regions.

January 2024

New LLM prompt content

You can now connect your video insights to Large Language Model (LLMs) for tasks like summarization and question answering. The API converts your video insights into a "prompt-ready" text format for use with LLMs. For more information, see Azure AI Video Indexer with LLM prompts.

December 2023

New preset option - Basic Video

Video Indexer has added a new indexing preset option, Basic Video. It's available when indexing in the cloud, or the edge with Video Indexers Azure Arc extension. It is a low-cost indexing option that includes many useful AI insights, including OCR, object detection, and visual labels. Basic Video can be used to generate insights together with Basic Audio (Basic Audio and Video) or on its own (Basic Video only). To learn more about your indexing options, see the Indexing configuration guide.

Get Frames API

You can now extract frames from an indexed video for a selected video section by making a FramesSasUrls request. For more information see FrameSelection.

Bring Your Own Model (Preview)

  • Added UI support for custom insights.
  • Added search support for custom insights.

For more information, see Bring Your Own AI Model.

Search by object on the Azure AI Video Indexer website and API

You can now use the search feature to search for videos with specific objects (for example, cars, motorcycles and more) on the Azure AI Video Indexer website or by using a search request.

November 2023

Video indexer has released the following things in November:

Azure AI Video Indexer enabled by Arc (Preview)

You can use Video Indexer for your hybrid scenarios by hosting it on-premises in a Kubernetes cluster. For more information, see the Azure AI Video Indexer enabled by Arc overview. You can also try out the extension by following the tutorial.

Bring Your Own Model (Preview)

You can use your own customized AI model and integrate the data with Video Indexer models. For more information, see Bring Your Own AI model.

Custom tags and free text per video (Preview)

You can add custom tags and free text as video metadata to any video in your Video Indexer account. This enables you to categorize and annotate your videos with any information that's relevant to you and your business. For example, you can add tags such as “product demo”, “customer testimonial”, or “internal training” or free text such as “This video shows how to use our new feature X” or “This video was recorded at our annual conference in Y”. They can be added to the area below the video once the video has been indexed.

Search based on custom tags and free text (Preview)

You can search for videos based on their custom tags and free text. This will enable you to find the videos that match your criteria more easily and quickly. You can search based on custom tags and free text in all supported languages, and you can combine them with other search filters such as keywords, faces, labels, emotions, etc. You can also use the advanced search syntax to perform more complex queries. For example, you can search for videos that have the tag “product demo” and the free text “feature X”.

We've added a number of improvements to the customized people model which improves the overall experience as well as the accuracy. People models are gated AI models that allow you to train your own model to recognize specific people in your videos. The new additions are:

Indication on the quality of people model (Preview)

You can get an indication on the quality of your customized People model (poor, fair, good). The quality is determined by the the number of images used for labeling with the more images you use to label a person, the higher the probability to identify the person correctly. For example, the probability of identifying a person with 24 labeled images is higher than the probability of identifying a person with 2 labeled images. You can see the number of images used for labeling each person in your customized People model page.

Choose a custom people model as default (Preview)

You can now choose a customized People model as default on the VI account user level, so you don't have to keep selecting the model name for every video upload. This will save you time and effort when you upload videos that need to be analyzed by your customized People model.

Grouping of unknown people in the video (Preview)

You can see the unknown people in your videos grouped by their appearance similarity. This will help you label the unknown people more easily and quickly, and to improve the accuracy of your customized People model. You can see the grouping of unknown people in your customization page > choose people and then navigate to the unknown people tab. This could, for example, help you to label a local celebrity or a local politician.

Search results with max confidence score for identified person name (Preview)

You can search for the name of an identified person and get when the person appears in the video, with the maximum confidence score. This helps you decide what are the most relevant videos to explore. For example, you can search for “John Smith” and get the videos where John Smith is recognized by your customized People model, along with the confidence score for each video.

Avoid duplicate indexing uploads

Occasionally you unintentionally submit the same indexing job multiple times. To avoid this, a new optional query parameter has been added, preventDuplicates. When set to true, the service will reject a file upload and return a conflict if it was already indexed.

The Upload URL MD5 duplicate checks rely on the server response Content-md5 header if exist RFC 1864: The Content-MD5 Header Field as it is commonly used by storage providers.

If you want to upload the same video repeatedly, you can set the parameter to false.

October 2023

New insight - Object detection

Video Indexer added a new insight, object detection, to both the standard and advanced video preset. It can be used to identify and track a wide range of objects that appear in your videos. To learn more, see Azure AI Video Indexer object detection overview.

September 2023

As a result of the June 30th 2024 retirement of Azure Media Services (AMS), Video Indexer has announced a number of related retirements. They include the June 30th 2024 retirement of Video Indexer Classic accounts, API changes, and no longer supporting adaptive bitrate. For full details, seeChanges related to Azure Media Service (AMS) retirement.

July 2023

Redact faces with Azure AI Video Indexer API

You can now redact faces with Azure AI Video Indexer API. For more information see Redact faces with Azure AI Video Indexer API.

API request limit increase

Video Indexer has increased the API request limit from 60 requests per minute to 120.

June 2023

FAQ - following the Azure Media Services retirement announcement

For more information, see AMS deprecation FAQ.

May 2023

API updates

We're introducing a change in behavior that may require a change to your existing query logic. The change is in the List and Search APIs, find a detailed change between the current and the new behavior in a table that follows. You may need to update your code to utilize the new APIs.

API Current New The update
List Videos • List all videos/projects according to 'IsBase' boolean parameter. If 'IsBase' isn't defined, list both.
• Returns videos in all states (In progress/Proccessed/Failed).		 • List Videos API will Return only videos (with paging) in all states.
• List Projects API returns only projects (with paging).		 • List videos API was divided into two new API’s List Videos and List Projects
• The 'IsBase' parameter no longer has a meaning.
Search Videos • Search all videos/projects according to 'IsBase' boolean parameter. If 'IsBase' isn't defined, search both.
• Search videos in all states (In progress/Proccessed/Failed).		 Search only processed videos. • Search Videos API will only search videos and not projects.
• The 'IsBase' parameter no longer has a meaning.
• Search Videos API will only search Processed videos (and not Failed/InProgress ones.)

Support for HTTP/2

Added support for HTTP/2 for our Data Plane API. HTTP/2 offers several benefits over HTTP/1.1, which continues to be supported for backwards compatibility. One of the main benefits of HTTP/2 is increased performance, better reliability and reduced system resource requirements over HTTP/1.1. With this change we now support HTTP/2 for both the Video Indexer Portal and our Data Plane API. We advise you to update your code to take advantage of this change.

Topics insight improvements

We now support all five levels of IPTC ontology.

April 2023

Resource Health support

Azure AI Video Indexer is now integrated with Azure Resource Health enabling you to see the health and availability of each of your Azure AI Video Indexer resources. Azure Resource Health also helps with diagnosing and solving problems and you can set alerts to be notified whenever your resources are affected. For more information, see Azure Resource Health overview.

The animation character recognition model has been retired

The animation character recognition model has been retired on March 1, 2023. For any related issues, open a support ticket via the Azure portal.

Excluding sensitive AI models

Following the Microsoft Responsible AI agenda, Azure AI Video Indexer now allows you to exclude specific AI models when indexing media files. The list of sensitive AI models includes: face detection, observed people, emotions, labels identification.

This feature is currently available through the API, and is available in all presets except the Advanced preset.

Observed people tracking improvements

For more information, see Considerations and limitations when choosing a use case.

March 2023

Support for storage behind firewall

It's good practice to lock storage accounts and disable public access to enhance or comply with enterprise security policy. Video Indexer can now access non-public accessible storage accounts using the Azure Trusted Service exception using Managed Identities. You can read more how to set it up in our how-to.

New custom speech and pronunciation training

Azure AI Video Indexer has added a new custom speech model experience. The experience includes ability to use custom pronunciation datasets to improve recognition of mispronounced words, phrases, or names. The custom models can be used to improve the transcription quality of content with industry specific terminology. To learn more, see Customize speech model overview.

Observed people quality improvements

Observed people now supports people who are sitting. This is in addition to existing support of people who are standing or walking. This improvement makes observed people model more versatile and suitable for a wider range of use cases. We have also improved the model re-identification and grouping algorithms by 50%. The model can now more accurately track and group people across multiple camera views.

Observed people indexing duration optimization

We have optimized the memory usage of the observed people model, resulting in a 60% reduction in indexing duration when using the advanced video analysis preset. You can now process your video footage more efficiently and get results faster.

February 2023

Pricing

On January 01, 2023 we introduced the Advanced Audio and Video SKU for Advanced presets. This was done on order to report the use of each preset, Basic, Standard & Advanced, with their own distinct meter on the Azure Billing statement. This can also be seen on Azure Cost Analysis reports.

Starting February 1st, we’re excited to announce a 40% price reduction on the Basic Audio Analysis, Audio Analysis and Video Analysis SKUs. We took into consideration feedback from our customers and market trends to make changes that will benefit them. By reducing prices and introducing a new Advanced SKU, we're providing competitive pricing and more options for customers to balance costs and features. Additionally, as we continue to improve and add more AI capabilities, customers will be able to take advantage of these cost savings when performing new or reindexing operations.

This change will be implemented automatically, and customers who already have Azure discounts will continue to receive them in addition to the new pricing.

Charge Basic Audio Analysis Standard Audio Analysis Advanced Audio Analysis Standard Video Analysis Advanced Video Analysis
Per input minute $0.0126 $0.024 $0.04 $0.09 $0.15

Network Service Tag

Video Indexer supports the use of Network Security Tag to allow network traffic from Video Indexer IPs into your network. Starting 22 January, we renamed our Network Security Service tag from AzureVideoAnalyzerForMedia to VideoIndexer. This change will require you to update your deployment scripts and/or existing configuration. See our Network Security Documentation for more info.

January 2023

Notification experience

The Azure AI Video Indexer website now has a notification panel where you can stay informed of important product updates, such as service impacting events, new releases, and more.

Textual logo detection

Textual logo detection enables you to customize text logos to be detected within videos. For more information, see Detect textual logo.

Switching directories

You can now switch Entra ID directories and manage Azure AI Video Indexer accounts across tenants using the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

Language support

  • New languages are now supported: Irish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Estonian, Croatian, Latvian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Icelandic, Armenian, Gujarati, Malay, and Tamil.
  • Use an API to get all supported languages: Get Supported Languages.

For more information, see supported languages.

Face grouping

Significantly reduced number of low-quality face detection occurrences in the UI and insights.json. Enhancing the quality and usability through improved grouping algorithm.

November 2022

Speakers' names can now be edited from the Azure AI Video Indexer website

You can now add new speakers, rename identified speakers and modify speakers assigned to a particular transcript line using the Azure AI Video Indexer website. For details on how to edit speakers from the Timeline pane, see Edit speakers with the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

The same capabilities are available from the Azure AI Video Indexer upload video index API.

October 2022

A new built-in role: Video Indexer Restricted Viewer

The limited access Video Indexer Restricted Viewer role is intended for the Azure AI Video Indexer website users. The role's permitted actions relate to the Azure AI Video Indexer website experience.

For more information, see Manage access with the Video Indexer Restricted Viewer role.

Slate detection insights (preview)

The following slate detection (a movie post-production) insights are automatically identified when indexing a video using the advanced indexing option:

  • Clapperboard detection with metadata extraction.
  • Digital patterns detection, including color bars.
  • Textless slate detection, including scene matching.

For details, see Slate detection.

Now supporting source languages for STT (speech-to-text), translation, and search in Ukraine and Vietnamese. It means transcription, translation, and search features are also supported for these languages in the Azure AI Video Indexer website, widgets, and APIs.

For more information, see supported languages.

Edit a speaker's name in the transcription through the API

You can now edit the name of the speakers in the transcription using the Azure AI Video Indexer API.

Word level time annotation with confidence score

Now supporting word level time annotation with confidence score.

An annotation is any type of additional information that is added to an already existing text, be it a transcription of an audio file or an original text file.

For more information, see Examine word-level transcription information.

Azure Monitor integration enabling indexing logs

The new set of logs, described below, enables you to better monitor your indexing pipeline.

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports Diagnostics settings for indexing events. You can now export logs monitoring upload, and reindexing of media files through diagnostics settings to Azure Log Analytics, Storage, Event Hubs, or a third-party solution.

Expanded supported languages in LID and MLID through Azure AI Video Indexer API

Expanded the languages supported in LID (language identification) and MLID (multi language Identification) using the Azure AI Video Indexer API.

The following languages are now supported through the API: Arabic (United Arab Emirates), Arabic Modern Standard, Arabic Egypt, Arabic (Iraq), Arabic (Jordan), Arabic (Kuwait), Arabic (Oman), Arabic (Qatar), Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Arabic Syrian Arab Republic, Czech, Danish, German, English Australia, English United Kingdom, English United States, Spanish, Spanish (Mexico), Finnish, French (Canada), French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Cantonese, Traditional).

To specify the list of languages to be identified by LID or MLID when auto-detecting, call upload a video API and set the customLanguages parameter to include up to 10 languages from the supported languages above. Please note that the languages specified in the customLanguages are compared at a language level thus should include only one locale per language.

For more information, see supported languages.

Configure confidence level in a person model with an API

Use the Patch person model API to configure the confidence level for face recognition within a person model.

View speakers in closed captions

You can now view speakers in closed captions of the Azure AI Video Indexer media player. For more information, see View closed captions in the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

Control face and people bounding boxes using parameters

The new boundingBoxes URL parameter controls the option to set bounding boxes on/off when embedding a player. For more information, see Embed widgets.

Control autoplay from the account settings

Control whether a media file will autoplay when opened using the webapp is through the user settings. Navigate to the Azure AI Video Indexer website -> the Gear icon (the top-right corner) -> User settings -> Auto-play media files.

Copy video ID from the player view

Copy video ID is available when you select the video in the Azure AI Video Indexer website

New dark theme in native Azure colors

Select the desired theme in the Azure AI Video Indexer website. Select the Gear icon (the top-right corner) -> User settings.

Search or filter the account list

You can search or filter the account list using the account name or region. Select User accounts in the top-right corner of the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

September 2022

General availability of ARM-based accounts

With an Azure Resource Management (ARM) based paid (unlimited) accounts, you're able to use:

To create an ARM-based account, see create an account.

August 2022

Update topic inferencing model

Azure AI Video Indexer topic inferencing model was updated and now we extract more than 6.5 million topics (for example, covering topics such as Covid virus). To benefit from recent model updates you need to reindex your video files.

Topic inferencing model is now available on Azure Government

You can now leverage topic inferencing model in your Azure AI Video Indexer paid account on Azure Government in Virginia and Arizona regions. With this release we completed the AI parity between Azure global and Azure Government. To benefit from the model updates you need to reindex your video files.

Session length is now 30 days in the Azure AI Video Indexer website

The Azure AI Video Indexer website session length was extended to 30 days. You can preserve your session without having to log in again every 1 hour.

July 2022

The featured clothing insight enables more targeted ads placement.

The insight provides information of key items worn by individuals within a video and the timestamp in which the clothing appears. This allows high-quality in-video contextual advertising, where relevant clothing ads are matched with the specific time within the video in which they're viewed.

To view the featured clothing of an observed person, you have to index the video using Azure AI Video Indexer advanced video settings. For details on how featured clothing images are ranked and how to view this insight, see featured clothing.

June 2022

Create Video Indexer blade improvements in Azure portal

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports the creation of new resource using system-assigned managed identity or system and user assigned managed identity for the same resource.

You can also change the primary managed identity using the Identity tab in the Azure portal.

Limited access of celebrity recognition and face identification features

As part of Microsoft's commitment to responsible AI, we're designing and releasing Azure AI Video Indexer – identification and celebrity recognition features. These features are designed to protect the rights of individuals and society and fostering transparent human-computer interaction. Thus, there's a limited access and use of Azure AI Video Indexer – identification and celebrity recognition features.

Identification and celebrity recognition features require registration and are only available to Microsoft managed customers and partners. Customers who wish to use this feature are required to apply and submit an intake form. For more information, read Azure AI Video Indexer limited access.

Also, see the following: the announcement blog post and investment and safeguard for facial recognition.

May 2022

Line breaking in transcripts

Improved line break logic to better split transcript into sentences. New editing capabilities are now available through the Azure AI Video Indexer website, such as adding a new line and editing the line’s timestamp. For more information, see Insert or remove transcript lines.

Azure Monitor integration

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports Diagnostics settings for Audit events. Logs of Audit events can now be exported through diagnostics settings to Azure Log Analytics, Storage, Event Hubs, or a third-party solution.

The additions enable easier access to analyze the data, monitor resource operation, and create automatically flows to act on an event. For more information, see Monitor Azure AI Video Indexer.

Video Insights improvements

Object Character Reader (OCR) is improved by 60%. Face Detection is improved by 20%. Label accuracy is improved by 30% over a wide variety of videos. These improvements are available immediately in all regions and don't require any changes by the customer.

Service tag

Azure AI Video Indexer is now part of Network Service Tags. Video Indexer often needs to access other Azure resources (for example, Storage). If you secure your inbound traffic to your resources with a Network Security Group you can now select Video Indexer as part of the built-in Service Tags. This will simplify security management as we populate the Service Tag with our public IPs.

Celebrity recognition toggle

You can now enable or disable the celebrity recognition model on the account level (on classic account only). To turn on or off the model, go to the Model customization > toggle on/off the model. Once you disable the model, Video Indexer insights won't include the output of celebrity model and won't run the celebrity model pipeline.

Screenshot showing the celebrity recognition toggle.

Azure AI Video Indexer repository name

As of May 1st, our new updated repository of Azure AI Video Indexer widget was renamed. Use https://www.npmjs.com/package/@azure/video-indexer-widgets instead.

April 2022

Renamed Azure Video Analyzer for Media back to Azure AI Video Indexer

As of today, Azure Video analyzer for Media product name is Azure AI Video Indexer and all product related assets (web portal, marketing materials). It's a backward compatible change that has no implication on APIs and links. Azure AI Video Indexer's new logo:

New logo

March 2022

Closed Captioning files now support including speakers’ attributes

Azure AI Video Indexer enables you to include speakers' characteristic based on a closed captioning file that you choose to download. To include the speakers’ attributes, select Downloads -> Closed Captions -> choose the closed captioning downloadable file format (SRT, VTT, TTML, TXT, or CSV) and check Include speakers checkbox.

Improvements to the widget offering

The following improvements were made:

  • Azure AI Video Indexer widgets support more than 1 locale in a widget's parameter.
  • The Insights widgets support initial search parameters and multiple sorting options.
  • The Insights widgets also include a confirmation step before deleting a face to avoid mistakes.
  • The widget customization now supports width as strings (for example 100%, 100vw).

February 2022

Public preview of Azure AI Video Indexer account management based on ARM in Government cloud

Azure AI Video Indexer website is now supporting account management based on ARM in public preview (see, November 2021 release note).

Leverage open-source code to create ARM based account

Added new code samples including HTTP calls to use Azure AI Video Indexer create, read, update and delete (CRUD) ARM API for solution developers.

January 2022

Improved audio effects detection

The audio effects detection capability was improved to have a better detection rate over the following classes:

  • Crowd reactions (cheering, clapping, and booing),
  • Gunshot or explosion,
  • Laughter

For more information, see Audio effects detection.

New source languages support for STT, translation, and search on the website

Azure AI Video Indexer introduces source languages support for STT (speech-to-text), translation, and search in Hebrew (he-IL), Portuguese (pt-PT), and Persian (fa-IR) on the Azure AI Video Indexer website. It means transcription, translation, and search features are also supported for these languages in the Azure AI Video Indexer website and widgets.

December 2021

The projects feature is now GA

The projects feature is now GA and ready for productive use. There's no pricing impact related to the "Preview to GA" transition. See Add video clips to your projects.

New source languages support for STT, translation, and search on API level

Azure AI Video Indexer introduces source languages support for STT (speech-to-text), translation, and search in Hebrew (he-IL), Portuguese (pt-PT), and Persian (fa-IR) on the API level.

Matched person detection capability

When indexing a video with Azure AI Video Indexer advanced video settings, you can view the new matched person detection capability. If there are people observed in your media file, you can now view the specific person who matched each of them through the media player.

November 2021

Public preview of Azure AI Video Indexer account management based on ARM

Azure AI Video Indexer introduces a public preview of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) based account management. You can leverage ARM-based Azure AI Video Indexer APIs to create, edit, and delete an account from the Azure portal.

Note

The Government cloud includes support for CRUD ARM based accounts from Azure AI Video Indexer API and from the Azure portal.

There is currently no support from the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

For more information go to create an Azure AI Video Indexer account.

People’s clothing detection

When indexing a video with Azure AI Video Indexer advanced video settings, you can view the new people’s clothing detection capability. If there are people detected in your media file, you can now view the clothing type they're wearing through the media player.

Face bounding box (preview)

You can now turn on a bounding box for detected faces during indexing of the media file. The face bounding box feature is available when indexing your file by choosing the standard, basic, or advanced indexing presets.

You can enable the bounding boxes through the player.

October 2021

Embed widgets in your app using Azure AI Video Indexer package

Use the new Azure AI Video Indexer (AVAM) @azure/video-analyzer-for-media-widgets npm package to add insights widgets to your app and customize it according to your needs.

The new AVAM package enables you to easily embed and communicate between our widgets and your app, instead of adding an iframe element to embed the insights widget. Learn more in Embed and customize Azure AI Video Indexer widgets in your app. 

August 2021

Re-index video or audio files

There's now an option to reindex video or audio files that have failed during the indexing process.

Improve accessibility support

Fixed bugs related to CSS, theming and accessibility:

  • high contrast
  • account settings and insights views in the portal.

July 2021

Automatic Scaling of Media Reserved Units

Starting August 1st 2021, Azure AI Video Indexer enabled Media Reserved Units (MRUs) auto scaling by Azure Media Services, as a result you don't need to manage them through Azure AI Video Indexer. That will allow price optimization, for example price reduction in many cases, based on your business needs as it is being auto scaled.

June 2021

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in six new regions

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in France Central, Central US, Brazil South, West Central US, Korea Central, and Japan West regions.

May 2021

New source languages support for speech-to-text (STT), translation, and search

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports STT, translation, and search in Chinese (Cantonese) ('zh-HK'), Dutch (Netherlands) ('Nl-NL'), Czech ('Cs-CZ'), Polish ('Pl-PL'), Swedish (Sweden) ('Sv-SE'), Norwegian('nb-NO'), Finnish('fi-FI'), Canadian French ('fr-CA'), Thai('th-TH'), Arabic: (United Arab Emirates) ('ar-AE', 'ar-EG'), (Iraq) ('ar-IQ'), (Jordan) ('ar-JO'), (Kuwait) ('ar-KW'), (Lebanon) ('ar-LB'), (Oman) ('ar-OM'), (Qatar) ('ar-QA'), (Palestinian Authority) ('ar-PS'), (Syria) ('ar-SY'), and Turkish('tr-TR').

These languages are available in both API and Azure AI Video Indexer website. Select the language from the combobox under Video source language.

New theme for Azure AI Video Indexer

New theme is available: 'Azure' along with the 'light' and 'dark themes. To select a theme, select on the gear icon in the top-right corner of the website, find themes under User settings.

New open-source code you can leverage

Three new Git-Hub projects are available at our GitHub repository:

New option to toggle bounding boxes (for observed people) on the player

When indexing a video through our advanced video settings, you can view our new observed people capabilities. If there are people detected in your media file, you can enable a bounding box on the detected person through the media player.

April 2021

The Video Indexer service was renamed to Azure AI Video Indexer.

Improved upload experience in the portal

Azure AI Video Indexer has a new upload experience in the website. To upload your media file, press the Upload button from the Media files tab.

New developer portal in available in gov-cloud

The Azure AI Video Indexer API developer portal is now also available in Azure for US Government.

Observed people tracking (preview)

Azure AI Video Indexer now detects observed people in videos and provides information such as the location of the person in the video frame and the exact timestamp (start, end) when a person appears. The API returns the bounding box coordinates (in pixels) for each person instance detected, including its confidence.

For example, if a video contains a person, the detect operation will list the person appearances together with their coordinates in the video frames. You can use this functionality to determine the person path in a video. It also lets you determine whether there are multiple instances of the same person in a video.

The newly added observed people tracking feature is available when indexing your file by choosing the Advanced option -> Advanced video or Advanced video + audio preset (under Video + audio indexing). Standard and basic indexing presets won't include this new advanced model.

When you choose to see Insights of your video on the Azure AI Video Indexer website, the Observed People tracking will show up on the page with all detected people thumbnails. You can choose a thumbnail of a person and see where the person appears in the video player.

The feature is also available in the JSON file generated by Azure AI Video Indexer. For more information, see Trace observed people in a video.

Detected acoustic events with Audio Effects Detection (preview)

You can now see the detected acoustic events in the closed captions file. The file can be downloaded from the Azure AI Video Indexer website and is available as an artifact in the GetArtifact API.

Audio Effects Detection (preview) component detects various acoustics events and classifies them into different acoustic categories (such as Gunshot, Screaming, Crowd Reaction and more). For more information, see Audio effects detection.

March 2021

Audio analysis

Audio analysis is available now in additional new bundle of audio features at different price point. The new Basic Audio analysis preset provides a low-cost option to only extract speech transcription, translation and format output captions and subtitles. The Basic Audio preset will produce two separate meters on your bill, including a line for transcription and a separate line for caption and subtitle formatting. More information on the pricing, see the Media Services pricing page.

The newly added bundle is available when indexing or re-indexing your file by choosing the Advanced option -> Basic Audio preset (under the Video + audio indexing drop-down box).

New developer portal

Azure AI Video Indexer has a new developer portal. Try out the new Azure AI Video Indexer APIs and find all the relevant resources in one place: GitHub repository, Stack overflow, Azure AI Video Indexer tech community with relevant blog posts, Azure AI Video Indexer FAQs, User Voice to provide your feedback and suggest features, and 'CodePen' link with widgets code samples.

Advanced customization capabilities for insight widget

SDK is now available to embed Azure AI Video Indexer's insights widget in your own service and customize its style and data. The SDK supports the standard Azure AI Video Indexer insights widget and a fully customizable insights widget. Code sample is available in Azure AI Video Indexer GitHub repository. With this advanced customization capabilities, solution developer can apply custom styling and bring customer’s own AI data and present that in the insight widget (with or without Azure AI Video Indexer insights).

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in the US North Central, US West and Canada Central

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the US North Central, US West and Canada Central regions.

New source languages support for speech-to-text (STT), translation and search

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports STT, translation and search in Danish ('da-DK'), Norwegian('nb-NO'), Swedish('sv-SE'), Finnish('fi-FI'), Canadian French ('fr-CA'), Thai('th-TH'), Arabic ('ar-BH', 'ar-EG', 'ar-IQ', 'ar-JO', 'ar-KW', 'ar-LB', 'ar-OM', 'ar-QA', 'ar-S', and 'ar-SY'), and Turkish('tr-TR'). Those languages are available in both API and Azure AI Video Indexer website.

Search by Topic in Azure AI Video Indexer Website

You can now use the search feature, at the top of the Azure AI Video Indexer website page, to search for videos with specific topics.

February 2021

Multiple account owners

Account owner role was added to Azure AI Video Indexer. You can add, change, and remove users; change their role. For details on how to share an account, see Invite users.

Audio event detection (public preview)

Note

This feature is only available in trial accounts.

Azure AI Video Indexer now detects the following audio effects in the non-speech segments of the content: gunshot, glass shatter, alarm, siren, explosion, dog bark, screaming, laughter, crowd reactions (cheering, clapping, and booing) and Silence.

The newly added audio affects feature is available when indexing your file by choosing the Advanced option -> Advanced audio preset (under Video + audio indexing). Standard indexing will only include silence and crowd reaction.

The clapping event type that was included in the previous audio effects model, is now extracted a part of the crowd reaction event type.

When you choose to see Insights of your video on the Azure AI Video Indexer website, the Audio Effects show up on the page.

Audio event detection

Named entities enhancement

The extracted list of people and location was extended and updated in general.

In addition, the model now includes people and locations in-context which aren't famous, like a ‘Sam’ or ‘Home’ in the video.

January 2021

Azure AI Video Indexer is deployed on US Government cloud

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account on US government cloud in Virginia and Arizona regions. Azure AI Video Indexer trial offering isn't available in the mentioned region. For more information go to Azure AI Video Indexer Documentation.

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in the India Central region

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the India Central region.

New Dark Mode for the Azure AI Video Indexer website experience

The Azure AI Video Indexer website experience is now available in dark mode. To enable the dark mode open the settings panel and toggle on the Dark Mode option.

Dark mode setting

December 2020

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in the Switzerland West and Switzerland North

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the Switzerland West and Switzerland North regions.

October 2020

Planned Azure AI Video Indexer website authenticatication changes

Starting March 1st 2021, you no longer will be able to sign up and sign in to the Azure AI Video Indexer website developer portal using Facebook or LinkedIn.

You'll be able to sign up and sign in using one of these providers: Entra ID, Microsoft, and Google.

Note

The Azure AI Video Indexer accounts connected to LinkedIn and Facebook won't be accessible after March 1st 2021.

You should invite an Entra ID, Microsoft, or Google email your own to the Azure AI Video Indexer account so you will still have access. You can add an additional owner of supported providers, as described in invite.
Alternatively, you can create a paid account and migrate the data.

August 2020

Mobile design for the Azure AI Video Indexer website

The Azure AI Video Indexer website experience is now supporting mobile devices. The user experience is responsive to adapt to your mobile screen size (excluding customization UIs).

Accessibility improvements and bug fixes

As part of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility guidelines), the Azure AI Video Indexer website experience is aligned with grade C, as part of Microsoft Accessibility standards. Several bugs and improvements related to keyboard navigation, programmatic access, and screen reader were solved.

July 2020

GA for multi-language identification

Multi-language identification is moved from preview to GA and ready for productive use.

There's no pricing impact related to the "Preview to GA" transition.

Azure AI Video Indexer website improvements

New search bar for deep insights search with additional filtering capabilities was added. Search results were also enhanced.

New list view with ability to sort and manage video archive with multiple files.

New panel for easy selection and configuration

Side panel for easy selection and user configuration was added, allowing simple and quick account creation and sharing as well as setting configuration.

Side panel is also used for user preferences and help.

June 2020

Search by topics

You can now use the search API to search for videos with specific topics (API only).

Topics is added as part of the textScope (optional parameter). See API for details.

Labels enhancement

The label tagger was upgraded and now includes more visual labels that can be identified.

May 2020

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in the East US

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the East US region.

Azure AI Video Indexer URL

Azure AI Video Indexer regional endpoints were all unified to start only with www. No action item is required.

From now on, you reach www.videoindexer.ai whether it is for embedding widgets or logging into the Azure AI Video Indexer website.

Also wus.videoindexer.ai would be redirected to www. More information is available in Embed Azure AI Video Indexer widgets in your apps.

April 2020

New widget parameters capabilities

The Insights widget includes new parameters: language and control.

The Player widget has a new locale parameter. Both locale and language parameters control the player’s language.

For more information, see the widget types section.

New player skin

A new player skin launched with updated design.

Prepare for upcoming changes

  • Today, the following APIs return an account object:

    The Account object has a Url field pointing to the location of the Azure AI Video Indexer website. For paid accounts the Url field is currently pointing to an internal URL instead of the public website. In the coming weeks we'll change it and return the Azure AI Video Indexer website URL for all accounts (trial and paid).

    don't use the internal URLs, you should be using the Azure AI Video Indexer public APIs.

  • If you're embedding Azure AI Video Indexer URLs in your applications and the URLs aren't pointing to the Azure AI Video Indexer website or the Azure AI Video Indexer API endpoint (https://api.videoindexer.ai) but rather to a regional endpoint (for example, https://wus2.videoindexer.ai), regenerate the URLs.

    You can do it by either:

    • Replacing the URL with a URL pointing to the Azure AI Video Indexer widget APIs (for example, the insights widget)

    • Using the Azure AI Video Indexer website to generate a new embedded URL:

      Press Play to get to your video's page -> select the </> Embed button -> copy the URL into your application:

    The regional URLs aren't supported and will be blocked in the coming weeks.

January 2020

Custom language support for additional languages

Azure AI Video Indexer now supports custom language models for ar-SY , en-UK, and en-AU (API only).

Delete account timeframe action update

Delete account action now deletes the account within 90 days instead of 48 hours.

New Azure AI Video Indexer GitHub repository

A new Azure AI Video Indexer GitHub with different projects, getting started guides and code samples is now available: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/media-services-video-indexer

Swagger update

Azure AI Video Indexer unified authentications and operations into a single Azure AI Video Indexer OpenAPI Specification (swagger). Developers can find the APIs in the Azure AI Video Indexer developer portal.

December 2019

Update transcript with the new API

Update a specific section in the transcript using the Update-Video-Index API.

Fix account configuration from the Azure AI Video Indexer website

You can now update Media Services connection configuration in order to self-help with issues like:

  • incorrect Azure Media Services resource
  • password changes
  • Media Services resources were moved between subscriptions

To fix the account configuration, in the Azure AI Video Indexer website, navigate to Settings > Account tab (as owner).

Configure the custom vision account

Configure the custom vision account on paid accounts using the Azure AI Video Indexer website (previously, this was only supported by API). To do that, sign in to the Azure AI Video Indexer website, choose Model Customization > <model> > Configure.

Scenes, shots and keyframes – now in one insight pane

Scenes, shots, and keyframes are now merged into one insight for easier consumption and navigation. When you select the desired scene you can see what shots and keyframes it consists of.

Notification about a long video name

When a video name is longer than 80 characters, Azure AI Video Indexer shows a descriptive error on upload.

Streaming endpoint is disabled notification

When streaming endpoint is disabled, Azure AI Video Indexer will show a descriptive error on the player page.

Error handling improvement

Status code 409 will now be returned from Re-Index Video and Update Video Index APIs in case a video is actively indexed, to prevent overriding the current reindex changes by accident.

November 2019

  • Korean custom language models support

    Azure AI Video Indexer now supports custom language models in Korean (ko-KR) in both the API and portal.

  • New languages supported for speech-to-text (STT)

    Azure AI Video Indexer APIs now support STT in Arabic Levantine (ar-SY), English UK regional language (en-GB), and English Australian regional language (en-AU).

    For video upload, we replaced zh-HANS to zh-CN, both are supported but zh-CN is recommended and more accurate.

October 2019

  • Search for animated characters in the gallery

    When indexing animated characters, you can now search for them in the account’s video galley.

September 2019

Multiple advancements announced at IBC 2019:

  • Animated character recognition (public preview)

    Ability to detect group ad recognize characters in animated content, via integration with custom vision.

  • Multi-language identification (public preview)

    Detect segments in multiple languages in the audio track and create a multilingual transcript based on them. Initial support: English, Spanish, German and French. For more information, see Automatically identify and transcribe multi-language content.

  • Named entity extraction for People and Location

    Extracts brands, locations, and people from speech and visual text via natural language processing (NLP).

  • Editorial shot type classification

    Tagging of shots with editorial types such as close up, medium shot, two shot, indoor, outdoor etc. For more information, see Editorial shot type detection.

  • Topic inferencing enhancement - now covering level 2

    The topic inferencing model now supports deeper granularity of the IPTC taxonomy. Read full details at Azure Media Services new AI-powered innovation.

August 2019 updates

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed in UK South

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the UK south region.

New Editorial Shot Type insights available

New tags added to video shots provides editorial “shot types” to identify them with common editorial phrases used in the content creation workflow such as: extreme closeup, closeup, wide, medium, two shot, outdoor, indoor, left face and right face (Available in the JSON).

New People and Locations entities extraction available

Azure AI Video Indexer identifies named locations and people via natural language processing (NLP) from the video’s OCR and transcription. Azure AI Video Indexer uses machine learning algorithm to recognize when specific locations (for example, the Eiffel Tower) or people (for example, John Doe) are being called out in a video.

Keyframes extraction in native resolution

Keyframes extracted by Azure AI Video Indexer are available in the original resolution of the video.

GA for training custom face models from images

Training faces from images moved from Preview mode to GA (available via API and in the portal).

Note

There is no pricing impact related to the "Preview to GA" transition.

User can choose to hide the gallery tab from the portal (similar to hiding the samples tab).

Maximum URL size increased

Support for URL query string of 4096 (instead of 2048) on indexing a video.

Support for multi-lingual projects

Projects can now be created based on videos indexed in different languages (API only).

July 2019

Editor as a widget

The Azure AI Video Indexer AI-editor is now available as a widget to be embedded in customer applications.

Update custom language model from closed caption file from the portal

Customers can provide VTT, SRT, and TTML file formats as input for language models in the customization page of the portal.

June 2019

Azure AI Video Indexer deployed to Japan East

You can now create an Azure AI Video Indexer paid account in the Japan East region.

Create and repair account API (Preview)

Added a new API that enables you to update the Azure Media Service connection endpoint or key.

Improve error handling on upload

A descriptive message is returned in case of misconfiguration of the underlying Azure Media Services account.

Player timeline Keyframes preview

You can now see an image preview for each time on the player's timeline.

Editor semi-select

You can now see a preview of all the insights that are selected as a result of choosing a specific insight timeframe in the editor.

May 2019

Update custom language model from closed caption file

Create custom language model and Update custom language models APIs now support VTT, SRT, and TTML file formats as input for language models.

When calling the Update Video transcript API, the transcript is added automatically. The training model associated with the video is updated automatically as well. For information on how to customize and train your language models, see Customize a Language model with Azure AI Video Indexer.

New download transcript formats – TXT and CSV

In addition to the closed captioning format already supported (SRT, VTT, and TTML), Azure AI Video Indexer now supports downloading the transcript in TXT and CSV formats.