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.
Hi @elon. Not really. What occurs is inconsistent. Testing Firefox on Ubuntu resulted in a video feed—but only for the presentation, which most of the time is the default Big Blue Button slide. When a presenter shares their screen, this takes over. The participants’ own video feeds (either as gallery or speaker view) do not appear.
Testing on Safari, Mac, clicking download results in the video loading in a new tab (no “corrupt file” message), where audio plays… but the screen itself is black.
Maybe there is an issue with the transcoding?
I doubt that since the recordings are from May 3 and May 10.
That’s good to know… though it doesn’t really meet our needs, as described above. I understand that this reflects a limitation of Big Blue Button, which puts the presentation front and center; whereas in our groups we typically speak face to face and occasionally screen-share, so it would be more useful to be able to download the webcam feeds, or really, a combo feed that weaves together webcams, presentation, and screen-shares, as a unified stream.
I believe that is what many groups have come to expect from Zoom, with the typical workflow involving recording a meeting in Zoom (which includes the webcams, screenshares, etc.) and then uploading to YouTube (or wherever). It seems that’s more or less where we’re still at too, for better and worse.
I’ll be curious to see how the Meet.coop roadmap develops, and would like to continue to be supportive. However, it doesn’t seem currently that we’re able to use the service as our main videoconferencing tool, until there is some kind of feature parity with these components. I hope the service continues to evolve!
a combo feed that weaves together webcams, presentation, and screen-shares, as a unified stream . . what many groups have come to expect from Zoom . .uploading to YouTube
‘A combo feed’ is what the presentation playback does so well. better than any other service I think, including public chat and live links too, interactive. The issue is, coding a downloadable mp4 file conversion that approaches the same kind of richness? And figuring what kind of UI is possible for controlling that richness in interactive playback. My hunch is, that’s a lot of development work, beyond what meet.coop will have available soon. @wouter@elon
Legacy here, of BBB’s origins in virtual-classroom education, as distinct from the social media ‘mass publishing’ genre that now has come to dominate usage of video rooms?
An unusual feature of the presentation playback is being able to record ‘animated’, hand-crafted, slide presentations that include live on-screen annotation. It would be great if this facility of the web playback was exploited by more users. Something not found in the world of Zoom.
Agreed with @mikemh about the Presentation mode, it’s a unique feature of BBB.
But also agreed with @illuminagent that many people need a recording of the webcams + whiteboard.
And that’s what we could do with the Video Streaming, a pilot we ran in 2021 with the City of Amsterdam, for the Cities for Change Conference with dozens of conf sessions, streamt to Vimeo and autorecorded there.
So if this is really an important feature, how could we add it on our production servers?
In reality it is an enhancement of GreenLight that allows a host to set up a rtmp video stream to an external server. @yurko and @elon developed some scripts to make sure the streaming bot would join… It may require some work for tech.circle but ultimately not that much?
This feels exciting. Would be great to get this into production. The genres of video streaming and mass publishing of video recordings are too dominant, for meet.coop to sit outside them? @osb
crowdfund
Yep Can Tech circle put a financial estimate on this?
Just wanted to clarify a couple of technical points:
BBB recordings consist of a number of resources, including:
A video file containing the audio of the room + the video stream of the presentation area (which could be uploaded slides, a shared screen or an external video).
A video file containing the audio of the room + the webcam area
Chat, shared notes and other resources such as slide thumbnails
The Presentation view, which is the only one present in vanilla Greenlight, composes all those resources so that users can “replay” what happened in the room. This feature is meant mainly for students who want to view past lectures.
Creating a downloadable video with presentation + webcams (+ chat?) has been in the official roadmap for a while but with a low priority, see for example this issue. One of the main developers stated a few days ago that they’re still planning on it to be included in a future release.
Until then:
If you’re only interested in point (2) above, webcams+audio, you can just open the presentation view, right-click on the webcams on the top left corner, and “Save video as”.
You could use a video editor to combine the presentation and webcam video files.
You can use OSB to capture the presentation view.
None of the above solutions is ideal, so I agree we should look for alternatives. The streaming route is an option, but it is very resource consuming and the recording is just a side effect of streaming to an external platform.
I have tested the script @hng mentioned and it works and the video will show up in Greenlight. We need to decide if we should use this script and when to push to production servers.
Glad to see all the activity on this topic! Super that there is an alternative script for recordings that could be usable.
@mikemh - re: the social.coop thread, my guess is that a Jitsi style app is more like what most users need, where the interface is more geared toward face-to-face group meetings rather than virtual classroom style lectures. I suppose ideally, we could choose one ‘mode’ or the other, but of course that would be more technically to maintain.
That said, I do recognize the power features of BBB, as @wouter also points out, e.g., the live whiteboard. In practice I don’t imagine tending to use these, but I can see how they would make the whole experience richer if we did.
@illuminagent I have manually rendered the new recordings for your room using the new script and it should show up as Video button. This won’t be automatically rendered yet until we do some testing.
Hi @elon. Thanks for that. Indeed, I am now able to download the video, and even on my Mac, the file plays correctly. No “corrupt file” error. So far so good!
The issue I see is that the resulting video file focuses the entire time on the presentation, in full size, rather than the speakers. That would be fine if the meeting was a lecture, but for face-to-face, it would be much better to have the active speaker and/or some kind of gallery in focus. See what I mean?
Even though, during our meeting I had minimized the default presentation slide, and brought up our webcam feeds front-and-center, the recording shows the slide as above for the duration.
That is helpful, @dvdjaco, thanks! To be clear: this only exports the webcams, not any screensharing or presentation, correct? So the workaround would work for events where there is no screensharing or presentation, but not in cases where a composite feed is desired. That probably covers us about 80% of the time. Not sure about other members…
That’s correct, that will download a video that only has the webcam streams. Allowing users more control over the composed video layout would be nice, e.g. having a webcam-centric layout and a presentation-centric one. As things stand right now it would mean generating 2 composed videos for each recording, which seems wasteful.
An alternative would be to use an on-demand, client-side solution (such as GitHub - danielpetri1/bbb-recording-exporter at client-side), where the user requests a downloadable video to be generated from the Greenlight UI, chooses a layout from 2-3 options and goes for a coffee while the GL instance grabs the streams and generates a downloadable video.
Can Tech circle put a financial estimate on this?