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

Cloud recording is a supplementary feature of our paid Whereby Embedded plans. You can review the pricing and options on our site.

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.

When configuring cloud recording options via the dashboard, it will apply these as default settings for all rooms created. However, you can override the defaults by specifying different preferences within the POST requests used to create meetings.

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.

File names will be automatically set to [room name]-[start time in ISO format].mkv and is the time when the recording started.

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

This feature requires the use of Amazon S3 storage. You can review their plans and pricing on the AWS site. Amazon also offers some free tier options to explore. Note that if you're creating an AWS account from scratch it can sometimes take up to 24 hours.

How to setup Amazon S3 bucket for Cloud Recording storage

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 a Bucket

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".

S3 info for Whereby

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.

It's recommended and considered best practice to create IAM users with the appropriate permissions for your AWS Access Keys. Sharing the credentials of a Root user can allow unrestricted access to all resources in your AWS account, including billing information. For more information, check out Amazon's support article: Best practices for managing AWS access keys

Where to create Access Keys

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.