Release Notes#

Current Release#

Version: 2026.1.0-rc1
Release Date: 15 May 2026

Changes:

  • Introducing new Dual UI mode with a new --summary --search CLI argument for setup.sh. This runs both summary and search applications simultaneously at /summary and /search URI endpoints respectively.

  • New Dual UI setup for helm chart installation. This is implemented by enabling ways to provide values override file for summary and search mode simultaneously.

  • Updates to setup script and nginx configuration files for flexible UI routing for each mode of deployment - existing summary mode, search mode, Unified UI Mode and the new Dual UI mode.

  • Refactored Helm chart to use a reusable vssui subchart with multi-mode nginx and consolidated embedding model config under global.embeddingModelName.

  • Bumped DLStreamer base image to 2026.1.0-ubuntu24-rc1 for Video Ingestion Microservice.

  • Setup Script: Updates in environment variable to setup embedding models. New MULTIMODAL_EMBEDDING_MODEL and existing TEXT_EMBEDDING_MODEL are used to provide embedding models in relevant modes.

  • Docker Compose: Replaced curl with Python urllib package in container healthcheck command for a lighter runtime footprint for Audio Analyzer.

  • Docker Compose: Replaced environment variables with hard coded mount paths. This helps in stopping containers without looking for preset variables.

  • Build Script: Removed Audio-Analyzer from the dependency build pipeline. A frozen version 1.3.3 will be used for the Audio Analyzer microservice for current and all subsequent releases.

  • Setup Script: Minor cleanup to remove unused environment variables and remove several environment variables being used as mount directories in Docker Compose files (some of these environment variables are still used pertaining to design issues).

Previous Release#

Version: 1.3.3-rc1
Release Date: 05 May 2026

Features:

  • Configurable final video summary: Added PM_PRODUCE_FINAL_SUMMARY feature flag to make the final LLM map-reduce video summary optional. When disabled, chunk-wise summaries are displayed chronologically instead. A per-video UI override checkbox is available in both upload flows. Audio transcript summarization is automatically skipped when the final summary is turned off.

  • Audio transcript summarization: Added audio transcript summarization support and improved audio transcription accuracy.

  • OVMS-first architecture: Replaced the standalone vlm-openvino-serving microservice with OpenVINO Model Server (OVMS) as the unified inference backend for both VLM captioning and LLM summarization. This is a breaking change; the vlm-inference subchart and container have been removed.

  • Performance Optimizations (MME & VDMS-Data-Prep):

    • Refactored pre-processing and inference with AsyncInferQueue based OpenVINO inference and static shape model compilation for iGPU.

    • Added ThreadPool for parallel open_clip image pre-processing with support for input tensor batching and padding for optimal OpenVINO inference paths.

    • Introduced PyAV-based video decode abstraction supporting keyframes and uniform sampled frames extraction with producer-consumer pattern for parallel decode and frame translation to PIL.

    • Enabled multiple/parallel decoder instances for file, RTSP stream, and bytes input sources.

    • Implemented frame batching for pipelined pre-processing and inference with integrated PyAV decoder in VDMS data-prep.

  • Search Timeout and Resource Management: Added SEARCH_DATAPREP_TIMEOUT_MS configuration to prevent VSS-UI timing out during embedding creation. Added ulimit constraints with soft and hard limits to enable shared memory creation and define memory block allocation boundaries.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Known Issues/Limitations:

  • This release includes only limited testing on EMT‑S and EMT‑D, some behaviors may not yet be fully validated across all scenarios.

  • HW sizing of the Video Search or Video Summarization pipeline is in progress. Optimization of the pipelines will follow HW sizing.

  • Known issues are internally tracked. Reference not provided here.

  • how-to-performance document is not updated yet. HW sizing details will be added to this section shortly.

  • NPU support with OVMS is added as experimental feature and may not work for all models or configurations.

Previous releases#

Version: 1.3.2
Release Date: 17 Feb 2026

Features:

  • In VSS search mode, users can now filter results by time range via:

  • Query parsing to infer time ranges (e.g., “person seen in last 5 minutes”).

  • Direct time range input from the UI.

  • Added live system performance metrics in the search UI (enable with export ENABLE_VSS_COLLECTOR=true).

  • Fixed the build script of the vdms-dataprep microservice.

  • Added telemetry collection of the application metrics for VDMS-dataprep microservice and VLM microservice at /telemetry endpoint.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Version: 1.3.1
Release Date: 20 Nov 2025

Features:

  • [VLM] Added cleanup helpers so every request releases OpenVINO infer requests; streaming responses call this once the event stream finishes to release resource and merge back the threads.

  • Sanity on user_override_variables.yaml file in VSS helm chart.

  • Updated the VLM, MME, VDMS-Dataprep docs to enable user to download public docker image and

  • added notes on embedding model selection for Helm charts.

  • Exposed the env variable MAX_CONTEXT_LENGTH to enable user to override this value for setting LLM model context length.

  • Trivy scan fixes for  audio-analyzer-microservice,  multimodal-embedding-microservice, pipeline-manager, vdms-dataprep, video-ingestion, video-search, vlm-openvino-serving.

  • Sanity on some deprecated field in helm which previously treat as Warning but now it have been treated as ERROR in latest helm version.

  • Removed failed search queries from search left column.

  • Fixed search UI checkbox selection/deselection issue.

  • Fixed VSS video upload streamable mp4 error message.

  • Documentations updates and some other required setup-script/code fixes to be able to build standalone Audio-Analyzer image and run/use it without any external dependency (like minio etc).

  • Updated image tags for various components and helm chart to version 1.3.1.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Version: 1.3.1-rc1
Release Date: 14 Nov 2025

Features:

  • Update VSS Helm chart configurations and dependencies for updated microservice dataprep, MME, search-ms

    • Added environment variables for embedding model configuration in multiple YAML files.

    • Updated image tags for various components to version 1.3.1.

    • Enhanced deployment configurations for multimodal embedding and VDMS DataPrep.

    • Improved documentation for embedding model settings and deployment instructions.

  • Video_Summary: Link to Multimodal embedding models are missing in the getting started guide

  • Video_Search: Change in models with different embedding dimension results in no video search

  • Video_Summary: When Video search is deployed with embedding model as Blip2/blip2_feature_extractor, Multimodal embedding serving does not run

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Version: 1.3.0
Release Date: 14 Nov 2025

Features:

  • Enhanced Multimodal Embedding (MME) Microservice:

    • Implemented CLIP, CN-CLIP, MobileCLIP, SigLIP2, and BLIP2 model handlers to support by OpenVINO support.

    • Added model registry and factory pattern for creating model handlers based on configuration.

    • Introduced text-only Qwen3-embedding model family support.

    • Enabled dual runtime support: models can run using native PyTorch or OpenVINO runtime.

    • Microservice supports both API and SDK modes of operation for flexible integration.

    • Implemented utility functions for embedding text and images with support for base64 and URL inputs.

    • Created application-level EmbeddingModel class for high-level functionality, including video processing.

  • VDMS DataPrep Microservice Improvements:

    • Changed video processing mechanism to extract and store frames individually in vector store for more granular content capture.

    • Enabled object detection on frames to capture additional contextual information.

    • Implemented batched mode processing for video frame aggregation.

    • Integrated SDK mode consumption of MME microservice for reduced API overhead.

    • Enabled batching and parallel processing of frame batches to significantly reduce video consumption time.

    • Enhanced SDKVDMSClient to support dynamic detection of text and image embedding capabilities.

    • Updated simplified_embedding_helper to remove Qwen model dependencies and utilize SDK for text embeddings.

    • Modified user guide to reflect changes in embedding model settings and usage instructions.

    • Adjusted setup.sh to set OpenVINO performance mode to “THROUGHPUT” for better efficiency.

    • Added build script for VDMS DataPrep to build the .whl file at runtime for docker image build. and update documentation for usage.

    • Added detailed data flow documentation and other documentation updates.

  • Search-MS and VSS Application Enhancements (Search Mode):

    • Enabled frame-to-video aggregation for consolidated video search results.

    • Introduced configurable aggregation settings in common.py for fine-tuning search behavior.

    • Enhanced segment scoring algorithm with qualitative metrics based on peak and sustained quality.

    • Implemented scoring that considers frame quality and contextual proximity for improved relevance.

    • Exposed all result fine-tuning parameters via environment variables for user customization.

    • Added troubleshooting section for search results with embedding model changes

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

Version: 1.2.3
Release Date: 31 Oct 2025

Features:

  • Enhanced helm configuration and deployment capabilities for GPU workloads, enabling better performance and flexibility.

  • Refreshed UI for a more intuitive and user-friendly experience, improving overall usability and navigation.

  • Updated to the latest supported OpenVINO Model Server (OVMS) version for improved stability and feature access.

  • Addressed issues flagged by Trivy and Dependabot scans to ensure stronger security and compliance.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Version: 1.2.2
Release Date: 06 Oct 2025

Features:.

  • Enhanced Helm Chart with RWOnce support and additional stability improvements.

  • Introduced initial VSS CLI for streamlined command-line operations.

  • Enabled persistent embeddings in VDMS to maintain state across container restarts.

  • Implemented search result grouping by tags for improved organization and filtering.

  • Updated unit tests to cover new features and recent code changes.

  • Addressed vulnerabilities flagged by Trivy and dependabot scans.

Version: 1.2.1
Release Date: 29 Sept 2025

Features:

  • Unified search and summarization functionality for streamlined user experience.

  • New UI for new combined use case.

  • API updates to support combined use case.

  • Enhanced video management with support for tags on upload and search.

  • Improved text embedding capabilities within the MME service.

  • Introducing Search Alerts and Directory Watcher for proactive monitoring on search use-case.

  • TopK search results now available in the UI for faster result filtering

  • Helm Chart for the combined application.

  • All application containers now run in non-root mode.

  • Fix for high RAM consumption when the application is running in combined mode.

  • Bug Fixes: Resolved multiple issues from previous builds to ensure stability and performance.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster

Known Issues/Limitations:

  • EMF and EMT are not supported yet.

  • RWOnce PVC access mode not supported.

  • Video Summarization with mini_cpm model not working on Xeon® 4 and Xeon® 6 machines.

  • Occasionally, the VLM/OVMS models may generate repetitive responses in a loop. We are actively working to resolve this issue in an upcoming update.

  • HW sizing of the Video Search or Video Summarization pipeline is in progress. Optimization of the pipelines will follow HW sizing.

  • VLM models on GPUs currently support only microsoft/Phi-3.5-vision-instruct.

  • The Helm chart presently supports only CPU deployments.

  • Known issues are internally tracked. Reference not provided here.

  • how-to-performance document is not updated yet. HW sizing details will be added to this section shortly.

  • In standalone search only mode, the tags feature on query is not working.

  • Sometimes during search, the response is not instantaneous. However, users can use the refresh button to fetch the results.

  • Directory Watcher service only supported in Search only mode.

Version: 1.2.0
Release Date: 04 August 2025 Features:

  • This is an incremental release on top of RC4.1 providing fixes for issues found on RC4.1 The notes provided under RC4.1 apply for this incremental release too.

  • Issues fixed are listed below:

    • Updated docker and helm to public registry.

    • Updated tags for the helm and docker images.

    • Sanity for deployment on EMT.

  • Limited support for EMT 3.0 based deployment. CPU-only configuration supported.

  • Images for all required microservices uploaded and available on Docker registry.

Version: RC4.1
Release Date: 29 July 2025 Features:

  • This is an incremental release on top of RC4 providing fixes for issues found on RC4. The notes provided under RC4 apply for this incremental release too.

  • Issues fixed are listed below:

    • Error message is displayed on the UI when invalid video is uploaded in both Video Search and Video Summarization modes.

    • Only mp4 format is supported currently. For other formats, error message is displayed on the UI.

    • Fix to ensure that the sample application can be shutdown in a terminal different from the one in which it was started.

    • A few minor documentation issues have been fixed.

    • Provided a means to manage the PVC in values.yaml file.

    • Fixed an issue where video summarization progress is kept in the pipeline manager service even if the specific video summary is deleted

    • Issues around tag handling for videos has been fixed.

    • Trouble shooting section updated with observed useful information.

    • Enabled a minimum configuration of Video Summarization to work on older Xeon configurations. Note that there is no official support for versions of Xeon earlier than Xeon 4.

Version: RC4
Release Date: 18 June 2025 Features:

  • Added Helm chart for Video Search and Summarization.

  • Streamlined microservices names and folder structure.

  • Updated documentation.

  • Reuse of VLM services with updates for Metro AI suite.

  • Addressed various issues and bugs from the previous builds.

  • Unified Video Search and Summarization Use Case: Integration of search and summarization capabilities into a single deployment experience. Users can select the use case deployment at runtime.

  • Elimination of Datastore Microservice Dependency: Simplified architecture by removing reliance on the datastore microservice.

  • Nginx Support: Added compatibility for both Helm and Docker Compose-based deployments.

  • Streamlined Build, Deployment and Documentation: Introduction of a setup script to simplify service build and deployment processes.

HW used for validation:

  • Intel® Xeon® 5 + Intel® Arc™ B580 GPU

  • Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster