Kollaborate Server 2026.1.1 is now out, with some significant changes to our self-hosted workflow platform.

New Link Commenting Flow

We've overhauled how commenting works for shared links. The order of operations is now reversed: the user enters their comment first and is then asked for their name. This improves user-friendliness and solves situations where users couldn't figure out how to enter a comment or entered their comment in the name field by mistake. This is just for the first comment; they are not asked for subsequent comments.

This is not necessary when sending emails directly from Kollaborate, as Kollaborate will assign their name as the first part of their email address.

Physical comment submit button

There is now a physical submit button for the comment box. This solves issues where some users could not work out how to submit a comment. You can still submit comments by pressing Enter.

Major architecture overhaul

We've made significant changes to how uploads and encoding jobs work behind-the-scenes, including rewriting most of our uploading code. Most of these changes are intended for the cloud and will not have noticeable effects when self-hosting, but you may notice slightly faster uploads.

New admin tool: Dangling File Locator

This tool helps you locate files that exist on disk but aren't in the database. This can occur if the file was scheduled for deletion but permissions issues prevented it from being deleted.

Improved accessibility

We've increased the contrast of some user interface controls to be more accessible, as well as improving how the site appears on screen readers. We plan more improvements in this area in future updates.

Other changes

• HAProxy will now automatically restart when new LetsEncrypt certificates are ready
• Thumbnails now use WebP
• Fixed an issue where not all permissions may be imported when importing custom roles from another project
• Fixed an issue where the duration overlay on a file's icon may not appear if the file exceeded 3 hours in duration
• History / Webhooks - Fixed an issue where newlines would not be interpreted correctly in history data
• Fixed an issue where captions would not be shown on-screen on mobile
• Fixed an issue that could prevent deleted files being removed from disk
• Fixed an issue where tags could not be added with square brackets surrounding the tag
• Player - Fixed an issue where clicking the banner to download an unplayable file wouldn't work
• Comments - Fixed an issue where link recipients could see buttons only relevant to logged-in users, such as Favorite and Make To-Do
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploading a file revision may not apply scoped workflows
• Webhooks - Fixed an issue where it may not send a signature for long results
• Comments - Fixed an issue where changing the author filter wouldn't update the list of comments
• Files - Fixed an issue causing title misalignment when opening a file in a new tab
• Workflows - Added an option to view all comments when creating a share link action in a File Workflow
• Trash - Fixed an issue where the page will crash if a file is deleted by a user whose account is then deleted
• Sharing - Fixed an issue preventing some links from rendering
• Player - Fixed an issue where PDF proxies of document files may not render in the player
• Fixed an issue where aliases would not work correctly when downloading a folder as a zip file
• Fixed an issue where proxies sometimes wouldn't download
• Fixed an issue where files with extremely long filenames might become inaccessible after uploading
• Fixed an issue causing some database passwords to not work correctly
• Fixed an issue where deleting a version would delete all versions
• File Deletion - Made trashing large quantities of files significantly faster
• Server performance improvements
• General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

We’re launching a new feature on this blog where we update you on the progress of Kollaborate every quarter. Because this is the first, we’re going to outline the past year and what we’re planning over the next quarter.

Over the past year we released our new Rust backend, which has allowed us to speed up and modernize many features of the site. We have gradually moved more and more features to the new backend, including file operations, viewing comments, file delivery, thumbnails, and some parts of the upload process. User-facing pages are still using the old backend but will speed up as more features are moved to the new backend.

The new backend also gives us a lot more insight into how well the service is operating, so we can respond more quickly to problems, especially problems that are region-specific and don’t affect the US where we are based.

We also added many new features including emoji comment reactions, instant file moves between projects, file tags, tagging a user in a comment, global search, template projects, saved searches, and more.

What we’ve been working on for the past five months or so is switching to a different storage provider. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as just swapping over a URL and required us to account for a lot of different factors than we had to with our previous provider, so this has been a long, arduous process. But we’re almost at a place where we can switch over completely, so that will happen very soon.

Part of this process involved making significant changes to how we handle uploads. We rewrote our uploader to better handle every kind of possible network condition, as well as significantly speeding up the Finishing stage. This is most noticeable on larger files, where finishing will now take 1-2 secs irrespective of file size, where before it could take minutes for a very large file. We now have lots of stats about the upload experience to help us monitor and improve it, and our new system is able to detect problems automatically and route around them. 

Over the next quarter we plan to finish the storage changeover and begin to reap the benefits of switching storage providers,  including faster video encoding and improved video quality. We also have other features in the pipeline, such as new workflows, better accessibility, a new help center, a new video player, and a captioning overhaul, but not all of these will launch this quarter.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.

Marker Import for Mac 2.2.4 - Dec 12 2025

• Fixed an issue that could cause data to be duplicated when sending to Final Cut Pro

Marker Import for Mac 2.2.3 - Nov 27 2025

• Improved compatibility with Final Cut Pro .fcpxmld files

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.5 - Oct 7 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Note: 2025.3.1 and higher have important changes to how files are stored on disk that makes them backwards-incompatible with earlier versions. See the release notes for 2025.3.1 for more details.

Changes:

• Fixed an issue that could prevent encoding jobs from completing (you might need to clear the queue in the Admin Dashboard and restart existing jobs)

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.4 - Oct 1 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Note: 2025.3.1 and higher have important changes to how files are stored on disk that makes them backwards-incompatible with earlier versions. See the release notes for 2025.3.1 for more details.

Changes:

• Database Backups - More reliability when exporting a table that's in the middle of being modified
• History - Fixed an issue where event thumbnails would be blank if the user did Quick Look on a file instead of opening the player
• Workflows - Restored old behavior of instantly deleting the original file instead of trashing it when run from a workflow. Manually removing the original file will still trash it
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploading from a file request link would fail if the resulting file had the same name as an existing file and would have been combined in a version stack
• Heatmaps - Fixed an issue where heatmaps may not be logged for link users
• Tasks - Fixed a crash when trying to view tasks from a project you don't have access to
• Comments - Fixed an issue preventing comments from being printed correctly
• Fixed an issue where events wouldn't be updated with the file's thumbnail when it changes
• Fixed an issue preventing file revision emails from being sent
• Fixed an issue that could prevent files in My Private Files being encoded
• API - Fixed a crash that could occur when listing files
• Player - Fixed an issue where thumbnails in the versions dropdown would be blank
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where files uploaded to My Private Files could be encoded twice
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where new versions of a file would appear as Version 1
• Thumbnails - It will now retry creating a thumbnail from frame 0 if the file was corrupt and could not be seeked
• Player - Improved the visual appearance of the timecode hover overlay
• File Browser - Fixed an issue where not all files / folders would be returned if there are a large number of departments
• File Moving - Fixed an issue where redirecting to the destination folder would not work correctly with departments
• Player - Don't say it's the original file if a proxy replaced the original
• Transcription - Fix crash if shared link doesn't exist
• Upgrader - Fix issue preventing caches being rebuilt upon upgrade
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Transfer 1.6.0 - Sep 18 2025

• Support for converting H.265 / HEVC source files
• Improved compatibility with recent versions of Kollaborate
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.3 - Sep 11 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Note: 2025.3.1 and higher have important changes to how files are stored on disk that makes them backwards-incompatible with earlier versions. See the release notes for 2025.3.1 for more details.

Changes:

• Fixed an issue that could cause files to be moved to a duplicate folder instead of the intended folder
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploading a file replacement could result in the new file being inaccessible
• Player - Fixed an issue where loading poster / audio waveform would not appear
• Fixed an issue that could cause icons in history events and email alerts to be blank
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.2 - Sep 4 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Note: 2025.3.1 and higher have important changes to how files are stored on disk that makes them backwards-incompatible with earlier versions. See the release notes for 2025.3.1 for more details.

Changes:

• Faster processing of PHP code and better caching makes pages load quicker
• Encoding - Fixed an encoder crash if an overlay has an apostrophe in the file's title
• Thumb Queue - Fixed a potential crash when adding new thumb jobs
• Files - Fixed an issue where creating a new folder inside a folder with special characters in the path would make the new folder disappear
• Player - Fixed hoverscrub thumb being blank when hovering over timeline
• Uploads - Fixed an issue preventing large files being uploaded
• Downloads - Fixed an issue where proxy URL might be incorrect when there are multiple proxies for a file
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Encoder 2.0.1 - Sep 4 2025

• Fix issue where it would say all encoded proxies were 540p irrespective of their actual resolution
• Fix issue where old hoverscrub thumbs might not be cleared out

Kollaborate Encoder 2.0.0 - Aug 27 2025

• Kollaborate Encoder no longer needs direct access to the web server's storage volume - it will now get all the data it needs by communicating only with the web server. This greatly simplifies installation and prevents certain issues that could occur when syncing file system changes through two Docker containers. (Requires Kollaborate Server 2025.3.1 or higher)
• Fix issue where hoverscrub thumbs may not be created
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.1 - Aug 27 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Major new features:

We've significantly changed how we store files on disk in this version. Files are no longer stored according to the project they reside in, meaning they no longer need to be moved around when moving files between projects. This has the most benefit on the cloud, but will also speed up large transfers for self-hosting too. The two versions are designed to co-exist - all new uploads will use the new format and existing files will remain in the old format but will be upgraded if moved between projects.

This does of course make it harder to downgrade to an older version, so we have provided a tool in the Admin Area to downgrade your files to the older format before reverting back to an earlier version.

Other changes:

• The following features were moved to the new backend: file deleting, file moving, splitting / combining versions, removing original files, removing proxies, encoding progress
• Changed how the web server communicates with Kollaborate Encoder, meaning the encoder no longer needs to share storage with the web server (requires Kollaborate Encoder 2.0)
• Added a new user permission: can leave comments. A user can be disallowed from leaving comments while still being able to view them
• Color Scheme - Added a new option for the active tab background color
• Upload Workflows - Support for "doesn't contain" as a match option
• Admin - Added an option to disable disk size checks. This is for situations where the host OS doesn't communicate the correct file size of the storage volume to the Docker container (most often occurs on macOS).
• Admin - Fixed issue preventing software update notifications from working
• More descriptive error message if session Redis URL is not set
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where links with an empty password could not be accessed, even if "require password" was off
• Player - Make full-screen overlay use page's background color
• Team - Fixed a crash if the project was not found
• Print Comments - Fixed an issue where settings in the Export dialog would not be taken into account
• Player - Fixed an issue where the CC button would not be highlighted when enabled
• Fixed several issues causing problems when upgrading from a very old version
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where clicking a user's name would produce an error page
• UI - Fixed an issue where TimecodeInput wouldn't work with drop frame timecode
• Workflows - Fixed an issue where users may not be able to approve files in the project root if they were non-admins added to another department
• Projects - Fixed an issue where deleting a template project would not remove it from the list
• Emails - Prevent digest emails from showing files that have been deleted
• Player - Update the workflow dropdown when approving or rejecting a file
• Projects - Fixed a crash when trying to modify a project that had been deleted
• Player - Don't show users who can't access that department in the Unviewed section of the player
• API - Don't allow comments to be inserted earlier than the start timecode
• Team - Fixed an issue where activation link checkbox wasn't working
• Projects - Fixed user count in table being inaccurate
• Workflows - Fixed an issue where users would be unable to approve a file
• Email - Fixed an issue where shared links might have their URLs corrupted
• Player - Fixed an issue preventing large files being attached to comments
• Files - Align titles irrespective of whether the file is unviewed
• UI - Fixed an issue where some icons would not adopt the page's text color
• Files - Fixed an issue where thumbnails may show file duration 1 second longer than it really is
• Fixed an issue where folders created by the new backend could have the wrong owner
• Fixed various issues with information not being copied across to aliases
• Timecode - Fix issue where comment timecode would drift over time
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.1 and Kollaborate Encoder 2.0 have been released, with major changes to our self-hosted workflow platform for video professionals.

Storage overhaul

We've significantly changed how we store files on disk in this version. Files are no longer stored according to the project they reside in, meaning they no longer need to be moved around when moving files between projects. This has the most benefit on the cloud, but will also speed up large transfers for self-hosting too. The two versions are designed to co-exist - all new uploads will use the new format and existing files will remain in the old format but will be upgraded if moved between projects.

This does of course make it harder to downgrade to an older version, so we have provided a tool in the Admin Area to downgrade your files to the older format before reverting back to an earlier version.

More backend modernization

We've continued the work of moving away from our older PHP-based backend. In this release, file deletion, file moves, combining / splitting versions, removing proxies, and removing original files were rewritten on the new backend.

Removing original files also has the added benefit that it is no longer destructive. Instead of immediately permanently deleting the original file, it now gets split off and trashed. Although it's no longer possible to restore it back as the original file, it can be restored as a separate file if needed.

Encoder simplification

Kollaborate Encoder is much simpler to set up in this release, as it no longer requires direct access to your storage volume. This means that you no longer have to share the volume as a network volume between both servers. It will now coordinate file transfers with the web server.

New permissions

You can now control whether or not the user can leave comments on a file, so you can choose to have a user be able to view comments but not add their own.

Other changes

• Color Scheme - Added a new option for the active tab background color
• Upload Workflows - Support for "doesn't contain" as a match option
• Admin - Added an option to disable disk size checks. This is for situations where the host OS doesn't communicate the correct file size of the storage volume to the Docker container (most often occurs on macOS).
• Admin - Fixed issue preventing software update notifications from working
• More descriptive error message if session Redis URL is not set
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where links with an empty password could not be accessed, even if "require password" was off
• Player - Make full-screen overlay use page's background color
• Team - Fixed a crash if the project was not found
• Print Comments - Fixed an issue where settings in the Export dialog would not be taken into account
• Player - Fixed an issue where the CC button would not be highlighted when enabled
• Fixed several issues causing problems when upgrading from a very old version
• Sharing - Fixed an issue where clicking a user's name would produce an error page
• UI - Fixed an issue where TimecodeInput wouldn't work with drop frame timecode
• Workflows - Fixed an issue where users may not be able to approve files in the project root if they were non-admins added to another department
• Projects - Fixed an issue where deleting a template project would not remove it from the list
• Emails - Prevent digest emails from showing files that have been deleted
• Player - Update the workflow dropdown when approving or rejecting a file
• Projects - Fixed a crash when trying to modify a project that had been deleted
• Player - Don't show users who can't access that department in the Unviewed section of the player
• API - Don't allow comments to be inserted earlier than the start timecode
• Team - Fixed an issue where activation link checkbox wasn't working
• Projects - Fixed user count in table being inaccurate
• Workflows - Fixed an issue where users would be unable to approve a file
• Email - Fixed an issue where shared links might have their URLs corrupted
• Player - Fixed an issue preventing large files being attached to comments
• Files - Align titles irrespective of whether the file is unviewed
• UI - Fixed an issue where some icons would not adopt the page's text color
• Files - Fixed an issue where thumbnails may show file duration 1 second longer than it really is
• Fixed an issue where folders created by the new backend could have the wrong owner
• Fixed various issues with information not being copied across to aliases
• Timecode - Fix issue where comment timecode would drift over time
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

Kollaborate Encoder 1.8.2 - Jun 16 2025

• Fixed an issue that could cause videos with a watermark to be too short
• Don't merge empty audio tracks
• Simplify cleanup of temp files
• Send encoding progress to new Rust backend
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.2.1 - Jun 16 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Changes:

• Emoji comment reactions
• Comments now use the new backend
• Comment Exporting - Supports setting file encoding for better compatibility with Avid
• Comment Exporting - Support for exporting an FCP 7 XML with the markers attached to a slug, for easier importing into Premiere Pro
• Share - Allow specifying custom expiry dates in QuickShare dialog
• Quick Share - Hide comment options when sharing files from My Private Files, where commenting is not available
• Player - Fixed an issue where toggling captions off would show the wrong captions when switching languages
• Fixed an issue causing a crash when loading the player if event information was corrupt
• Fixed an issue causing email alerts to incorrectly be sent when replying to your own comment
• Workflows - Fixed an issue where deleting the original file wasn't working
• Player - Fixed rewinding requiring multiple keypresses to trigger
• Fixed a crash when trying to view Files page
• Projects - How to create a template is now more obvious when creating a new project
• Files - Fixed an issue where upload error messages would be cut off
• Emails - Fixed formatting issues with custom messages to link emails
• Files - Fixed a crash that could occur when viewing a link while logged in
• Files - Fixed a crash when sorting by uploader
• Player - Fixed an issue where clicking inside the comment box in full screen could pause the video
• Fixed an issue where dates weren't taking into account the user's timezone correctly
• Sharing - Fixed a crash with 100% numeric link IDs
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

We've just released Kollaborate Server 2025.2.1, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform for video professionals.

The big new feature in this version is emoji comment reactions. Now you can add extra context to a comment by acknowledging it with a thumbs-up, or simply laughing at a joke. We support all modern emojis so you're not limited in the reactions you can choose.

We've also modernized the commenting system and comments are now being delivered by our new backend, which should make them much faster to load than before.

Comment exporting has options allowing you to choose the file encoding, which can help with issues importing certain characters into older apps, but the default of UTF-8 will suffice for the majority of cases.

We've added a new option to export comments to a blank slug in an FCP 7 XML file, which makes exporting into Premiere Pro easier. To import using this method, import the XML file into Premiere and place the slug on your timeline on a track above the content. You can then disable the track or hide the slug to see the content below, while still being able to access the markers. This is an alternative to using our Marker Import app and round-tripping an XML of your entire project. However, despite the existence of this feature, our recommended method of importing markers into Premiere Pro remains to use our Premiere panel.

You can view the full list of changes here after logging in.

There is also a new update to Kollaborate Encoder with minor bug fixes and improvements to burning in watermarks.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

Kollaborate Server 2025.1.4 - Apr 23 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Changes:

• Telemetry has been removed from this version due to a low signal-to-noise ratio
• Allow importing comments and captions from another file
• Player - The comment count is now shown in the Comments tab
• Player - The approval section is now collapsible
• Player - Allow more easily switching workflow from the Player page
• Fixed an issue preventing removing the original file if the file is in My Private Files
• Uploads - Fixed an error that could occur when uploading to My Private Files
• Player - Fixed an issue where disabling player tabs wouldn't work
• Player - Fixed a crash if tags are corrupt
• Emails - Fixed an issue where it could inadvertently send alerts about a user's actions to that user
• Files - Fixed an issue where deleting a version stack might not delete all files in the stack
• History - Fixed an issue where user names could appear empty
• Folder Downloading - Fixed an issue causing empty zip files when downloading a subfolder inside a department
• Fixed several permissions issues with My Private Files
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.1.3 - Apr 11 2025

Important: The Docker image is configured to convert the current database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading to any version as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise. You can download the current database as a .sql file from the Tools section of the Admin Area. We recommend doing this BEFORE copying the newer version's files over.

Changes:

• Added CPU optimizations to improve performance - requires a CPU made in the last decade
• Fixed several issues with the installer, including an issue preventing licenses from being installed
• Comments - Fixed user tagging not working on Chrome
• Fixed a crash when generating thumbnails manually
• Projects - Show error message when deleting a project if it can't be found
• Files - Fixed a crash when viewing the Files page if a user doesn't have permission to view workflows
• Sharing - Show error if linked file doesn't exist
• Quick Share - Fixed an issue where the Quick Share dialog wouldn't show Delete Link and Email Link buttons
• Fixed a crash when viewing tasks
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations