We have produced a second release candidate for JHOVE 1.24 due to a problem with the final build. The issue only affects the validation of AES image metadata which is a new feature. It’s caused by an incompatibility between Java 8 and Java 9 byte code described here: https://github.com/apache/felix/pull/114. The original release candidate was built using Java 9 and this issue means the original RC would crash but only when validating AES metadata on Java 8 or earlier.

There is a code patch but for now we’ve simply chosen to rebuild the release candidate using Java 8. We had to run the build twice to fix the issue hence the new release candidate is RC3 rather than RC2 and is available here: https://software.openpreservation.org/releases/jhove-installer-rc.jar. This version should run on all versions of Java. Thanks to those who reported the issue.