Please read this article carefully to avoid problems in production.

At Transloadit, we make sure that when our customers provide Assembly Instructions, they will continue to work and produce the same results for years on end. Over the last ten years, we have gone many extra miles in order to hang on to our old stack versions for ImageMagick and FFmpeg, despite being vulnerable targets for hackers.

While our aim is to support stack verions for a very long time, eventual deprecation is part of running a healthy operation.

More recent versions of ImageMagick, FFmpeg and underlying libraries provide faster, less error-prone, and more secure conversions, which is in everybody's interest. Also, these newer stacks often have better compression algorithms or use existing codecs more efficiently, thereby reducing the size of result file. This could have a direct impact on your monthly invoice.

Which stacks are deprecated and when will they cease to exist?

As of today, we are deprecating the imagemagick_stack parameter values v1.0.0 (current default) and v2.0.3 for all of our image-related Robots. The new default version for all image-related Robots will be "imagemagick_stack": "v3.0.0".

We are also deprecating the ffmpeg_stack parameter values v1.0.0 (current default), v2.0.0, v2.1.0 and v2.2.3 for all of our video- and audio-related Robots. The new default version for all those Robots will be "ffmpeg_stack": "v5.0.0".

On February 1, 2020 these old stack versions will be considered EOL (End Of Life) and are then no longer supported. On that day, everybody's Templates and Assembly Instructions will be auto-upgraded to the new stack versions.

Can I already upgrade to the new stacks? How do I upgrade?

Yes, definitely! In fact, we recommend to upgrade early, so you can spot possible issues with your use case much earlier, while still being able to go back to the old stacks.

For image-related Robots, you only need to add or change the parameter "imagemagick_stack" to the value "v3.0.0" for the /image/resize Robot in your Templates.

For video/audio-related Robots, you only need to add or change the "ffmpeg_stack" parameter to the value "v5.0.0". Your custom FFmpeg parameters should continue to work. If they don't, please let us know.

Warning emails

As of today, we have installed warnings via email about the usage of deprecated stacks. With their help, you will know which Assemblies (and Templates) are using deprecated stacks. The emails will be sent once a week. You can opt out at the bottom of this page, but we strongly recommend against that in order to not have any unpleasant surprises in production on February 01, 2020.

Reporting problems

We have made sure that the migration to newer stacks will be as painless as possible for everybody. For instance, we're automatically converting old custom FFmpeg instructions to newer syntax. There should only be a handful of edge cases where people might run into problems.

If you spot a problem or Assembly error, which is the result of upgrading your ImageMagick or FFmpeg stack, please report them in our little chat widget that you see on every page in the bottom right corner.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please do let us know!