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Recording management

Introduction​

PILOS is able to manage recordings from BigBlueButton servers. This includes the transfer of the recordings to PILOS for permanent storage and serving.

Follow the steps below to set up the recording management.

Permissions​

To allow the BBB-Server to write the recording files and PILOS to read the files, the file permissions need to be set correctly. Therefore, you need to create a user and group on both systems.

On the BBB Server you need to create a group pilos-spool and add the bigbluebutton user to this group.

# Create a new group shared by the BBB-Server and PILOS
addgroup pilos-spool --gid 2000
# Add the bigbluebutton user to the pilos-spool group
usermod -a -G pilos-spool bigbluebutton

On the PILOS server you also need to create a group pilos-spool with the same group id.

# Create a new group shared by the BBB-Server and PILOS
addgroup pilos-spool --gid 2000

Transferring recordings​

To transfer the recording files to PILOS you have two options:

  • Shared storage
  • Rsync over ssh

Shared storage​

To use shared storage, you need to mount the shared storage to the BBB-Servers and PILOS.

On the BBB Server you need to set the mount point in the spool_dir setting of the pilos.yml file.

spool_dir: /mnt/storage/recordings-spool

On the PILOS server you need to map the mount point to the /var/www/html/storage/recordings-spool folder of the docker container (adjust the docker-compose.yml).

x-docker-pilos-common: &pilos-common
    volumes:
        - '/mnt/storage/recordings-spool:/var/www/html/storage/recordings-spool'

Check transfer​

Next make sure permissions are correctly set for the shared storage.

On the PILOS server:

chown pilos-spool:pilos-spool /mnt/storage/recordings-spool
chmod 775 /mnt/storage/recordings-spool

You can try to create a file in the shared storage from the BBB-Server and check if you can read it from PILOS.

On the BBB-Server:

sudo su - bigbluebutton -s /bin/bash -c echo "test" > /mnt/storage/recordings-spool/test.txt

On PILOS:

# Check if the file is readable
docker compose exec app cat storage/recordings-spool/test.txt
# Check if the file can be deleted
docker compose exec app rm storage/recordings-spool/test.txt

Rsync over ssh​

On the PILOS server:

We first have to create a new user on the PILOS server that should be used to transfer the files from the BBB-Server.

adduser --disabled-password --ingroup pilos-spool --gecos "" pilos-spool

This user has no password, therefore it can only be used via ssh with key authentication. To further secure the transfer, you can later restrict the user to only run the rsync command.

On the BBB server:

  1. Create an ssh key for the bigbluebutton user on the BBB-Server.
su - bigbluebutton -s /bin/bash -c "ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -N '' -f ~/.ssh/pilos && cat ~/.ssh/pilos.pub"
  1. Edit the .ssh/config file of the bigbluebutton user and add the following lines.
su - bigbluebutton -s /bin/bash -c "nano ~/.ssh/config"
Host pilos
    HostName pilos.example.com
    User pilos-spool
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/pilos

This will tell the BBB-Server to use the ssh key and the pilos-spool user when connecting to the PILOS server.

On the PILOS server:

The public key of the bigbluebutton user needs to be added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file of the pilos-spool user.

su - pilos-spool -s /bin/bash -c "mkdir ~/.ssh && chmod 700 ~/.ssh && nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

You can paste the public key from the BBB-Server and restrict the key to only run the rsync command in the recordings-spool directory:

# Example key restricted to rsync and the path of the recordings-spool directory
command="/usr/bin/rrsync /srv/pilos/storage/recordings-spool/",restrict ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAII87OBtxWJYWUc/Y13O2GYZ5c91uR8HesEirQ4SMrpsM bigbluebutton@bbb-server

Lastly you need to make sure the pilos-spool user has the correct permissions to read and write the recordings-spool directory.

mkdir -p /srv/pilos/storage/recordings-spool/
chown pilos-spool:pilos-spool /srv/pilos/storage/recordings-spool/
chmod 775 /srv/pilos/storage/recordings-spool/

Check transfer​

Next make sure permissions are correctly set for the shared storage.

On the BBB-Server:

su - bigbluebutton -s /bin/bash -c "echo "test" > test.txt && rsync --verbose --remove-source-files test.txt dev.pilos-thm.de:/"

Notice the / at the end of the command, this is the path of the recordings-spool directory on the PILOS server as you restricted the key to only run the rsync command in this directory.

On PILOS:

# Check if the file is readable
docker compose exec app cat storage/recordings-spool/test.txt
# Check if the file can be deleted
docker compose exec app rm storage/recordings-spool/test.txt

Post publish script​

To transfer the recording files to PILOS for permanent storage and serving, you need to setup a post_publish script.

You can find an example post_publish script in the bigbluebutton directory of the PILOS repository. This script needs to be installed on all BBB-Servers in the /usr/local/bigbluebutton/core/scripts/post_publish directory.

You also need configure the script using the config file in the bigbluebutton directory of the PILOS repository. Adjust and install the file in the /etc/bigbluebutton/recording/ directory.

If you are using the shared storage, you need to set the spool_dir setting in the pilos.yml file to the local mountpoint on the BBB-Server.

spool_dir: /mnt/storage/recordings-spool

If you are using rsync over ssh, you need to set the spool_dir setting in the pilos.yml file to the rsync destination.

spool_dir: pilos.example.com:/

Cleanup​

BigBlueButton processes all recording formats independently of each other. However, BigBlueButton only has a command to delete a recording, not a specific format.

We save a sender.done file for a meeting once the first format has been processed. You can use Scalelite's script to clean up the recordings. However, this can lead to data loss if not all formats have been processed before the cleanup is performed.

Importing recording​

Recording files are imported using the scheduler, checking for new files in the spool directory every minute. New files are added to a queue and imported in the background. You can check the queue status using Horizon (Main menu -> System Monitoring -> Horizon).

The import script expects the recording files to be inside a .tar archive file. Each archive file should only contain the recording files of one meeting. The script will try to extract the archive file to a temporary directory, import the recording files from there into the database and the application storage.

If the import was successful, the archive file will be deleted.

By default all recording files are only visible to the meeting owner. The owner can change the visibility of the recordings in the UI.

Failed imports​

If the import failed (extract failed, recording doesn't belong to a room, etc.), the archive file will be moved to the failed directory in the spool directory. You can check the log files and Horizon for more information. You can also retry the import using Horizon.

Config options​

Customize recording download​

Room owners can download the raw recording files for archiving, uploading to other video platforms, etc. The BigBlueButton recording raw files include many files that typical users don't need. Therefore, you can customise which files are included in the download. You can filter the files using a regular expression in the .env file.

In this example, only pdf, ogg, mp4, m4v and webm files are included in the download.

RECORDING_DOWNLOAD_ALLOWLIST='^.*\.(pdf|ogg|mp4|m4v|webm)$'

Max. retention period​

Admins can customise the retention period for recordings, after which the system automatically deletes the recordings. This setting can be changed in the application settings on the UI.

You can also set a maximum retention period that cannot be exceeded by the administrators. This setting can be defined in the .env file. The value can be either -1 = unlimited or a number of days.

RECORDING_MAX_RETENTION_PERIOD=365

Max. recording description length​

Users can change the description of a recording. You can limit the length of the description in the .env file. The current default value is 1000 characters.

RECORDING_DESCRIPTION_LIMIT=255

The maximum configurable value is 65,535 characters. As the entire description is displayed in the overview of the recordings, such a high limit is not recommended.

Tips and tricks​

Using a different group id​

You can use a different group id for the pilos-spool group, but you need to make sure the group id is the same on both systems.

For PILOS to also use the same group id, you need to adjust the docker-compose.yml file.

x-docker-pilos-common: &pilos-common
 environment:
   PILOS_SPOOL_GID: 5000

Using multiple BBB-Servers and PILOS instances​

If you are sharing the same BBB-Serves with multiple PILOS instances, you need to make sure the recordings are transferred to the correct PILOS instance. To do this, you should have a central storage server that is accessible from all BBB-Servers and PILOS instances.

The BBB-Servers mounts the spool directory from the central storage server. Each PILOS instance has a subdirectory in the spool directory of the central storage server that only contains the recordings for this PILOS instance. This subdirectory is mounted to the PILOS instance.

To tell the post_publish script in what subdirectory the recordings should be transferred, you need to set the RECORDING_SPOOL_SUB_DIRECTORY environment variable. PILOS will send this as a meta variable on the creation of each meeting and the post_publish script will use this to transfer the recordings to the correct subdirectory.

RECORDING_SPOOL_SUB_DIRECTORY=instance1

Update the BigBlueButton recording player​

The BBB Recording Player is included in the Docker container. However, it can be upgraded independently of the docker container.

You will need to map the player directory to the host system using docker compose.

x-docker-pilos-common: &pilos-common
    env_file: .env
    volumes:
        - './public/playback-player:/var/www/html/public/playback-player'

Next, use pilos-cli to build the player with the release version you want.

docker compose exec app pilos-cli playback-player:build 5.0.2