The BigBlueButton web conferencing system provides the ability to record meetings. Rather than producing a single video file though, it produces multiple assets (webcam footage, screenshare footage, slides, scribbles, chat, etc) and relies on a web player to assemble them.
This project provides some scripts to download the assets for a recorded presentation, and assemble them into a single video suitable for archive or upload to other video hosting sites.
The scripts are written in Python and rely on the GStreamer Editing Services libraries (GES). On an Ubuntu 20.04 system, you will need to install at least the following:
sudo apt install python3-gi gir1.2-ges-1.0 ges1.0-tools libgirepository1.0-dev
The first script will download the presentation assets locally:
./download.py presentation_url outdir
The presentation_url should be a full URL containing the string
/playback/presentation/2.0/playback.html?meetingId=. This will
download the presentation metadata, video footage and slides.
The second script combines the downloaded assets into a GStreamer Editing Services project.
$ ./make-xges.py asset_path presentation.ges
You can control the resulting video size, starta nd end timestamps, margins, background image, opening and closing credits and more via command line parameters. See ./make-xges.py -h for details.
Currently the project includes the following aspects of the BBB recording:
- Webcam audio and video
- Screensharing
- Slides
- Whiteboard scribbles (excluding text)
Currently not supported (but planned):
- Whiteboard text-boxes
- Mouse cursor position
- Text chat
The project can be previewed using the ges-launch-1.0 command line tool:
ges-launch-1.0 --load presentation.xges
or rendered into a video with:
ges-launch-1.0 --load presentation.xges -o videofile.webm
This work is based on https://github.com/plugorgau/bbb-render.
The original Licence still applies (see LICENCE file).