Our Networks 2020

[benhylau]

Moving you to a new thread since this will probably spiral into a longer conversation

Original post by @Hank:

@Hank

Hi! I’m Hank and for the last few years I’ve been helping out Our Networks with live-stream production and all aspects of post production. I’d like to clarify the ideal situation for recording files for us and run through a few questions I have about BBB video call recording.

As I understand it BBB records all streams separately and then when the call ends it auto processes them into a single file. Having the ability to grab all the separate sources (webcam, screen-share, and any presentation files) is perfect for me! I recognize this is a rather niche use case, most people will probably want their videos as all-in-one packages, but for video editing having the source files would be super rad and allow me to maintain the same post workflow as last year.

Questions!

1. This page of the BBB docs mentions EDLs, is this referring to Edit Decision List files? If so would it be possible for me to have those too? What’s in them, how does the software determine cut points? Will this give me auto synced audio? I’d love to find out!
2. How does video recording stop and start? Is it when everyone has left the room? Can this be manually triggered?
3. How are files labeled? There are a maximum of 18 talks that could be recorded this year, that’s at least 36 different video files assuming they all have slides and only one presenter source. It’s not the end of the world if they’re not labeled and I’m cool with sorting some things through at the end of each day but if there’s a system for this that could make the pipeline easier for me that’d be cool!
4. Can videos be saved as widescreen 16:9? I googled this and apparently it was a feature on the flash client but may or may not have been implemented in the HTML5 one, if anyone knows the answer to this that’d be super cool. Super bonus points if we can go above 240p resolution too.

[benhylau]

I am going to send a quote to Our Networks tomorrow (Fri) and make sure we can be the BBB provider. Then we sort this

[hng]

@Hank

As I understand it BBB records all streams separately and then when the call ends it auto processes them into a single file. Having the ability to grab all the separate sources (webcam, screen-share, and any presentation files) is perfect for me!

By default BBB is not generating a single file for a recording. There is a web view that displays all the data of the recording together and you can also download all separate files e.g. presentation, webcams, chat, whiteboard etc. Also if you search on Github for bigbluebutton recording etc. you will find a lot of scripts that help you to download all these files.

@Hank

• This page of the BBB docs mentions EDLs, is this referring to Edit Decision List files? If so would it be possible for me to have those too? What’s in them, how does the software determine cut points? Will this give me auto synced audio? I’d love to find out!

Yes these are probably the same EDLs. I think you should test all this with our demo server.

• How does video recording stop and start? Is it when everyone has left the room? Can this be manually triggered?

There is a button in the meeting to start/stop recording.

• How are files labeled? There are a maximum of 18 talks that could be recorded this year, that’s at least 36 different video files assuming they all have slides and only one presenter source. It’s not the end of the world if they’re not labeled and I’m cool with sorting some things through at the end of each day but if there’s a system for this that could make the pipeline easier for me that’d be cool!

The folder containing all the files of the recording is named with the internal meeting id (which are just numbers and characters) but I think you can get from the meeting with it’s name to that url via Greenlight.

• Can videos be saved as widescreen 16:9? I googled this and apparently it was a feature on the flash client but may or may not have been implemented in the HTML5 one, if anyone knows the answer to this that’d be super cool. Super bonus points if we can go above 240p resolution too.

I think this is not possible atm. But maybe just test it?

[/quote]

[Hank]

Alright, @elon and I have tested this functionality and we have a working system for getting the source video streams for the conference. @benhylau has asked me to publish our plans here so that everyone is on the same page.

Rooms with recording enabled are always being cached as soon as the meeting starts. Rooms with recording disabled (any room that has conference participants in it who are not presenting) are not cached ever. We will make clear to presenters that, as soon as they join the presentation room, they are being recorded to the server and we will set the room to record as the first task we do when setting up each presentation to make sure that there is no mismatch of expectations. Like previous years, in our published videos only the actual segments of the talk that are being streamed will be used, any other parts will be removed by me.

After the presentation is finished and the stream has been set to the in-between titles I will end the meeting which kicks everyone from the call and saves the cache to disk. Elon will then send me the specific cache files (which are organized by meeting room and stored in /var/bigbluebutton/) to me over a separate cloud server. At no point in this process do I, a non meet.coop member, have access to any other client data, just our information from our calls.

A “better” implementation of this would be to create a custom post script that cuts the cached files based on when the actual recording feature is triggered by the user before dumping them into a folder. Unfortunately with less than a week left and no development budget agreed upon when we purchased this service this seems very out of scope… though possibly a noteworthy option for the future.

I recognize that this system of Elon accessing the server and manually sending us files we wouldn’t otherwise have access to is not one that was initially discussed when negotiating a contract for Our Networks and that this is not officially within scope of the services that meet.coop offers at this time. I can only ask that you accommodate us here as there is no other way of accomplishing this task with this level of fidelity or quality. I’m really just trying to do my best with the 480p camera streams that I’m given.

[benhylau]

Meet.coop decided that this is okay with the following conditions:

• only Our Networks content in the cache will leave our server, not meeting IDs of other users
• the file transfers will not eat up significant bandwidth during busy hours (we don’t expect this to be the case as the files are small, and there is the option of “caching the cache” in another directory first)
• @elon is doing this manual work not at the cost of Meet.coop (not tracking time against Meet.coop)
• we receive acknowledgement for the data use from an official Our Networks organizer

Also friendly reminder to still press the record button to get the official video, in case you missed transfer of the cache and it gets purged you still have the recording.

[Hank]

This all sounds great! I really appreciate your flexibility in the matter. Will get confirmation from the organizers on how to proceed.