Cloud Recording
Cloud recording is a feature of our paid Embedded plans and allows you to record meetings that are saved to a storage bucket accessible by you.
Storage options
We offer two storage options for our cloud recording feature.
Whereby-provided storage
By choosing Whereby-provided storage for recordings, you can can take full advantage of the flexibility of cloud recording without the need to configure and maintain your own Amazon S3 bucket for media storage.
Depending on your plan, you will have some Whereby-provided storage quota available for free. For example, Whereby Build customers have 30 GB days of storage included in their plan. They can store 1 GB of recordings for 30 days, 2 GB of recordings for 15 days or 30 GB of recordings for 1 day each month for free, at no additional cost.
There is an additional storage fee applied to recordings saved in Whereby-provided storage above the free storage quota available in your plan. You can check the current price of Whereby-provided storage as well as available free storage quota on Whereby's pricing page or in the "Subscription" section of your customer portal.
Whereby would not delete your media files automatically, so we recommend that you periodically delete the obsolete recordings from Whereby storage or download them to the storage of your choice.
You can delete or download the recordings either through the "Recordings" page in Whereby customer portal or using our Recordings API.
Your Amazon S3 bucket
You may also choose to store cloud recordings in an Amazon S3 bucket owned and managed by you. This is more technical to set up, but may suite your business needs better if you already own and manage Amazon S3 storage.
Setup
You can access recording settings and options from the “Configure” → “Recording” section of your customer portal. You can also specify recording preferences via the API during a room creation request.
After setting up the appropriate information, select how you would like to trigger your recording in rooms.
Auto-start (1 person) Recordings will start when the first person joins and end when the last person leaves
Auto-start (2 people) Recordings will start when 2 people join a room and end when the last person leaves
Prompt host Display a prompt to the host to manually start recording
Manual Host will manually start by clicking "Record" in the toolbar
Recording format
You can choose the format in which you want to save the recordings. Currently you can select either .mkv or .mp4 file formats.
Recording quality is set to 720p, however individual video feeds may appear in lower quality depending on their network connection, device, and preferences.
Managing recording activity
With our recording.finished webhook event, you can be aware of when a recording has finished and successfully uploaded to your AWS or Whereby hosted storage. More importantly, you can know the filename to programmatically use or manage that recording for your platform needs.
You can use our webhook events to track when a recording has started and stopped. The roleName will be set to recorder, and will use the room.client.joined and room.client.left events accordingly.
In addition to tracking recordings, we offer commands to start and stop recordings at your leisure via our SDK's Web Component.
Downloading from Whereby-provided storage
If you choose to save your cloud recordings in Whereby-provided storage you can delete or download them manually through you Whereby customer portal or using our Recordings API.
You can access all recordings saved in the Whereby-provided storage from the “Recordings” page of your customer portal.
Setup and information in S3
If you choose to use your own storage, there are a few pieces of information to gather from your S3 instance to create and connect your bucket with Whereby. We'll outline each one briefly below and how to locate the information.
Creating an S3 bucket can be done from the Amazon S3 console page. If S3 isn't presented as an option you can search for it within the services search at the top of the page.
For in depth instructions about bucket naming conventions and settings, please follow the Amazon support guide "Create your first S3 bucket".
Host: This is also known as your Bucket name. No URL is required, you can simply copy and paste your bucket name found in your S3 console.
Access Key ID & Access Secret: You can locate or create your Access Key and Access secret in the "Identity and Access Management" (IAM) section of your console.
Key & secret rotation:
If you wish to rotate the access key at regular intervals, Whereby supports setting new keys on the organization level using our admin UI, or on a per room level using our REST api.
Please ensure however, that any recording started before updating the key is allowed to finish before invalidating the old key. The following steps should ensure continuous operation: (One day before invalidation of old key)
Create a new access key & secret with identical permissions to the existing one
Update cloud recording settings in the admin UI with the new key / update code which uses our REST api to include new key
Wait until all existing recordings have completed (max recording duration is 24 hours)
Delete / invalidate old key
Known limitations
Cloud recording does not support our Breakout Groups feature. When using Breakout Groups, the recorder will remain in the main room and will not capture any of the meeting content from individual groups.
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