Self-serve download video recordings

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.

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That on-demand possibility sounds intriguing, @dvdjaco. I don’t see any problem with waiting a little while Greenlight generates the style of recording one wants. I imagine this might save some server resources too.

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Hi!

At the Tor project, we are using video recordings to save some of our usability interviews BUT we really need these recordings to be private all the time. Is there any possibility that this option may come to meet.coop’s BBB any time soon?

Hi @gaba! I understand that’s a tricky situation: you do want to record the session, but even though you don’t make the recording public, it’s still there on the server.
I think your best option would be to self-record the session locally and don’t record anything on the server.

  • If you want to avoid recordings of your session to be stored on our server, as per the official BBB instructions: BigBlueButton : Privacy you can switch off the recording option in the room config, so there’s no server-side recording for the room
  • For recording locally AFAIK the OBS is a very decent tool to do so. Maybe you or someone in the team has already got some experience with it? Or maybe there are simpler tools to do the job as well.

WRT the publicness of the recording: people who know the link can access it; but it seems humanly very hard to guess the link. Nevertheless, is there anybody here who knows about the server side configurations that could be improved to “harden” this? For example, would it make sense to add a webserver access control layer to it? In such way that those members who DO want to share (some) recordings publicly don’t get blocked. Sounds hard to me, but maybe someone here has a thought about that?

I’d be very interested to know how this works for you.

People that are being monitored would be able to get that link leaked. We will look into tools to record on our side.

The other option would be that we set up a dedicated BBB server for you. In that case we can restrict all access to recorded files with a login/password so that only you can access them. That’s something unfeasible on a shared server where many people want to share links to recordings with others (publicly).

See the website for Dedicated servers. That’s a higher cost though.

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I think the safest way to do this is to have one person locally record using OBS. I have done this in the past.