This is exactly the type of content publishing feature into non-YouTube platforms I am hoping we can develop as Meet.coop in the future. There is especially a lot of opportunities to publish into the decentralized space. We can publish to PeerTube, Internet Archive (which gives a torrent link), IPFS (ipfs.io and infura, etc.), Dat, etc.
Step 1 as you said, is to:
Code for this is at the link I gave. Provided to me by the folks at bbb.nzoss.nz .
BTW I’m still keen to set up an Aotearoa-based node of meet.coop, also using CatalystCloud.nz , and I have been talking with a group that could be Client #1 for that service.
We’ve already implemented this with this script and we’ve added a “Download” button. The script generates a video file with the presentation and audio track, nothing more. In general BBB has no concept of a file that represents a complete recording, as a recording consist of audio, webcams, chat, presentation, whiteboard… So we have to decide what needs to be in this file, for now presentation+audio seems to be enough from my POV, but I never had much to do with recordings of video calls.
Welcome back 
I know that Our Networks need the webcam stream as well, OPEN 2020 also needed that.
@osb I suppose OPEN 2020 would’ve preferred presentation + webcam + audio together as a single video file?
Our Networks would like the presentation + webcam as two separate video files, the way BBB has it, since historically they do that post-processing themselves.
In the tracker ticket, there is a question of hardware requirement to ‘enable on demand video playback’
Looking at the rate of video file size per hour,
it seems to me any type of storage, be it HDD or SDD, should do.
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!
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!
How does video recording stop and start? Is it when everyone has left the room? Can this be manually triggered?
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!
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 posted some associated costs in the Production server configuration and costs card and added OVH and Hetzner for comparison alongside the quote provided by Koumbit. See the file attachments and comment section on that card.
You can download the video without any problems if the video format is suitable. If not, then that’s a problem. But it’s probably no secret that you can change the design and size of the file. This is usually done with the help of a converter. But if you say that you could download the video with the help of the server administrator, you can continue to do so. But for me, it’s much more convenient to convert and upload video with a proven program. I like that the multimedia format I’m using has high audio fidelity. Since it’s a format developed by Microsoft, it’s natively supported by all Windows devices. Likewise, it is compatible with most non-Microsoft devices and players because of its popularity.
Can someone tell me how I can edit a video from Twitch?
I’ve never used the built-in recording feature of the BBB. I’ve always used third-party apps that let me do screen captures.
@WinifredHobbs You might also want to try the built in recording features of Greenlight/BBB? You not only get webcams and slide presentation. You also get annotations on the whiteboard, posts in the chat (with clickable links), a sidebar of slide shorcuts, switched focus between video thumbnails and slides. This expanded, interactive playback is only available thro Greenlight.
The mp4 downloadable playback is pretty tame by comparison and can of course be delivered with 3rd party apps. But the Greenlight recording allows for example a full presentation to be recorded in BBB - slides plus voiceover plus annotations/livemarkup plus clickable links posted in the chat. An example (without the talking head and chat but with annotations) : Learning spaces
In comparison, a screengrab would not be interactive. And pauses during recording (eg to help the presenter gather their thoughts) are not displayed in the BBB recording. Of course, recording presentations isn’t something every user may want to do, and screengrab may be all that’s wanted.
Hi there, Thanks for you all your efforts to set up this platform. I’ve been testing out Meet.coop and have tried to record a couple sessions for our org, Cosmos Co-op. However, when I try to download the recordings (which comes as an mp4 file), they play audio only. The screen is black.
From the room recordings page, I am able to open the presentation in the browser, which does show all the video feeds (as well as chat; it can replay the whole meeting)—however, if I switch to the speakers feed, I can right-click on the screen to download these as a webm file. This file excludes the presentation. It also excludes the screen-sharing I did during the meeting. Is that how it’s supposed to work? During the session, we had minimized the default presentation and switched to the gallery view of speakers. This doesn’t seem to make a difference to the output file.
Is there any way to download a recording that includes both the speaker and presentation/screenshare video/audio feeds in one file, which could be uploaded to video hosting for public sharing?
Great to hear from you @illuminagent thanks. Some of what you comment on is how BBB and its Greenlight interface are designed. But the black screen in the mp4 downlaod is a fault. @dvdjaco can Tech circle please pick this up?
The way to display slide and on-screen annotations, as well as the contents of the Shared Chat and its clickable links, and to switch between presentation and video thumbnails, is to use the Playback mode. These elements are not included in an mp4 download (and I think in principle some of the most helpful, like the clickable links in the chat, could not be - @dvdjaco @wouter am I right?).
If you choose to set the playback of the Presentation to ‘Visible’ rather than ‘Unlisted’ in the room’s Greenlight interface, anyone who visits the room’s login page can initiate playback. And of course the link to the playback can be shared, so that anyone can initiate playback in their own browser.
I find this works well, even if the playback window isn’t integrated inside another web page. The features available in Playback are much more extensive than those available in an mp4 format download. Is there some reason why sharing a Playback link won’t meet your needs, and a hosted mp4 has to be your means of communication?
Thanks for the reply, @mikemh.
Not wedded to hosted mp4. It is nice, actually, being able to replay an entire conversation, with all the components that were there (screenshares, chats, etc), rather than only a single A/V feed, via the link. Even in Zoom, the chat is a separate file, not part of the video recording. I suppose the downsides that come to mind might include:
I also wonder about storage & bandwidth. We currently have at least a couple hundred of 1-2 hr average video recordings of meetings, book groups, and topical conversations on Vimeo. I imagine we might start eating up resources if these started accumulating on the Meet.coop servers. As I have only recently begun getting familiar with the project, I am not yet up to speed on the allowances being envisioned.
Yep. A link isn’t the same UI as an embedded playback window. But usable?
- not being able to organize many videos, by topic or type, and create an archive which could be sorted, searched, filtered…
A webpage (or even a site) of links can be constructed of course.
- mobile usability?
In my limited experience (Android phone, Firefox browser) playback works quite well. The UI is more clunky of course (small screen, touch not full keyboard/mouse) but works well enough. It’s split between two screens that can be toggled.
I also wonder about storage & bandwidth.
Hmmnn. meet.coop doesn’t have a policy on this at present - true @wouter ? ‘Fair use’ would apply. But there isn’t a predefined norm. I suspect that the Greenllight UI will be inconvenient, before size of storage becomes a huge issue. Greenlight will soon become inconvenient (just a flat list in date order) when more than around a dozen files are stored, is my guess. If a user (you) started to accumulate large amounts of recording we’d need to define a service level on this.
Yeah, I’d say. It could be used. Though from a design or “user experience” perspective, it is probably not ideal, as there isn’t the interesting visual element (or it would have to be added as a separate image), and it leads people away from the site they are on, so perhaps breaks a certain flow of attention.
True. But for the above…
I’m sure it will come up sooner or later! In any event, I’m less concerned about paying fairly for resources we may use, which we would want to do regardless, and more so with the ability to organize a lot of media files and present them in a nice way. However, I understand that that may be beyond the scope of the Meet.coop service. Or perhaps, there could be some way to create “albums” and categories or a tagging system for cataloguing a larger collection of events, within Greenlight?
It would be sufficient for our purposes to have a video file that exactly reproduces the flow of the discussion—showing the speakers when they are speaking, the presentation when there is a presentation, and any screensharing when that occurs.
One of the issues we have with Zoom is that there is a cumbersome workflow involved with producing events, downloading the video files, uploading them somewhere else, adding the appropriate metadata, and then embedding them wherever we embed them, and also making sure they are deleted from Zoom. It would be REALLY NICE to have a single (cooperatively owned & managed) platform where that all could happen in an integrated manner:
Tbh, my dream would be that a video conferencing service such as Meet.coop could be integrated with a Discourse forum, so there could be some seamless way to create a topic which invokes a video (or audio only) meeting, which then gets automatically embedded in the topic. That is what I hope we can do eventually on Infinite Conversations, but I could see many communities finding such an integration useful.
This is an interesting vision @illuminagent and we should note it. I and others agree that the Greenlight interface, the existing recording-handling options, and the uses that are made of the video recording capacity of BBB could all usefully be extended. Some of this is a matter of technique, and some of it is UI development.
However, development of these kinds is well beyond our capability at present. All of the tech work that we can support needs to go into maintaining the service, chasing bugs and reliability. As we expand our membership, thus revenue, thus work hours, development becomes possible. And Greenlight as a UI for handling video recordings might then be on a development agenda.
In principle where does this fit in to a longer term roadmap @wouter @dvdjaco @Yurko @osb ? What kind of ranking might developments in this area have?
PS: “Asynchronous continued participation” is one of the main things that I personally feel needs to be developed as a practice. For example, this Forum is part of the 'hidden product" in meet.coop, still much under used. Here’s some personal thinking about toolsets for organisers, as a lineup in federated wiki learnstack
PPS Concerning event setup and follow-through . . we did experiment for a while (a year ago) with Mobilizon, to organise events in our commons.hour series. But it seemed a little flaky in places, and the functions don’t extend as far as your spec would want to - for example, compiling listings, and continued asynch interaction. Or at least, it wasn’t obvious, how such things might be done - the interface is not 100% transparent and our time for a learning curve was limited.
What decided us was: YAI (yet another interface) to be learned - by us as organisers and our members as users. So we reverted to this forum for organising commons.hour and its follow-through. It works even if it’s not elegant, it’s a familiar format (son-of-bulletin-board) and it’s part of the basic tool architecture of this organisation.
The commons.hour event format here in Discourse comprises:
All of this, pretty manual 
thanks for the feedback and very good suggestions, @illuminagent !
for now we’ll have to work with what we have, but if/when we have funding for enhancing our cooperative service offering.
As Mike suggests above, Mobilizon would be interesting to create events in a social networked fashion on the ActivityPub decentralised protocol. So it’s automatically part of the Fediverse.
Add to that a PeerTube server to store, share and stream videos, also in ActivityPub.
And discussion could be on any of the Fediverse servers, like social.coop or any other Mastodon server, using that ActivityPub protocol. We actually did run some Live Streaming from dedicated meet.coop servers for Cities for Change from Amsterdam City last year. Then we were sending those streams to Vimeo. But it could as well be sent to PeerTube. That would be quite a dream scenario, right, doing all that in a decentralised social network fashion?
In any case, some would need to work on the funding of such project before we could go down that road. If you know of opportunities and/or would be willing to help, let us know 
To reply some of your more immediate concerns:
So far, after two years of running the meet.coop service, storage of recordings hasn’t yet become an issue to worry about for the short term. It maybe that at some point we’ll need to devise a strategy to handle the storage, share load with other video/media platforms or start to put certain limits or price extra space. But it is not yet on our agenda.
That sounds like an incident. Can you send us the details, here or if you prefer to contact @ meet . coop?
Hi, @mikemh and @wouter, thank you both for the replies. I understand that my vision (and the larger vision) of an integrated, efficient, AND beautiful, distributed (and localizable) cooperative communications and collaborative infrastructure will not be achievable immediately, but it seems to me many of the pieces that could be stitched together to do so already exist, as you’ve also noted (and documented in those wikis), so I am hopeful for the dream scenario.
I would love to help bring awareness to and raise some money for that kind of work, but it will take some time to create our own momentum (as more of a cultural movement) before Cosmos will be of great use. That said, though small (which is beautiful), I believe we are well on our way. Right now, it is nice to have an ethical alternative to Zoom. But we do need to be able to download those mp4 files.
Using the latest Firefox on a Mac, when I click on the Download links above, I get the following screen:
I am also able to right-click the button and download the mp4 file directly, however, when I play that file the screen is black (although audio works). This happens with both of the meetings we’ve conducted. Thanks for any help you can offer.