Streaming and recording a conference

This topic provides an overview of Pexip Infinity's support for streaming and recording. For specific step-by-step instructions on how to integrate with some popular streaming services, see Integrating with streaming and recording services.

Pexip Infinity can output a dedicated RTMP multimedia stream to enterprise CDN (Content Delivery Network) streaming and recording services such as Wowza, Adobe, VBrick, Quickchannel, Qumu and Azure Media Services, and to public streaming services such as YouTube, Facebook and Periscope. Any Pexip conference can be streamed as a live event to an unlimited number of viewers, and can automatically be recorded and stored for later consumption.

If your conference contains presentation content, you have the option of setting up dual streams so that you can output the main video and presentation content channels separately. This means that viewers can simultaneously access the main video stream of the participants and a separate presentation content stream.

The administrator or meeting Host has to decide whether to set up the conference with a single RTMP stream or with dual RTMP streams.

When a conference is single streamed:

  • Viewers are automatically switched between the main video stream and the presentation stream whenever someone is presenting.
  • When someone is presenting, the video stream of the active speaker is shown in a small window in the upper right corner of the presentation.
  • The same single stream (with automatic switching between main video and presentation streams) can be made available later as a recording.

When a conference is dual streamed:

  • Viewers have to manually switch between the main video stream and the presentation stream, according to their preference. (However, viewers could optionally view the streams in two separate windows — one window showing the main video stream and the other window showing the presentation stream.)
  • The main video stream is not embedded as a small window within the presentation stream.
  • If nobody is currently presenting, Pexip Infinity sends a placeholder image on the presentation stream.
  • If the event is made available later as a recording, it can only be played back as two completely separate streams. There is no synchronization between the streams.

Note that your firewall needs to allow outbound traffic from the Conferencing Node to TCP port 1935 on the RTMP streaming server.

Streaming indicators

Participants in a conference that is being streamed or recorded see the following indicators:

  • A streaming icon is displayed to the right of the main video layout. Whenever a new participant joins the conference, and every two minutes otherwise, this icon will briefly slide out and show the text "Streaming enabled". The icon and text can be changed, and the streaming indicator can be disabled; see Creating and applying themes to conferences.
  • The participant list on Infinity Connect clients also shows the streaming or recording device to which the stream is being sent. A streaming participant has a streaming badge next to its name (which usually takes the form of the URL to which the stream is being sent).
  • If a Skype for Business / Lync client records a conference, the streaming indicator is shown on the video conferencing systems, and if recording via Pexip Infinity, an indicator is shown to SfB/Lync clients.

For administrators looking at a conference graph, streaming participants are identified by a indicator.

Participants in Google Hangouts Meet conferences

In addition, audio prompts indicating that streaming has been started/stopped are played to callers who are gatewayed via Pexip Infinity into a Google Hangouts Meet conference. The content of these audio files can also be changed by customizing a theme.

General instructions for setting up streaming

In general, to integrate with a third-party streaming or recording service:

  1. From the streaming provider, obtain an address to which the video stream will be sent.
  2. Initiate a call from the Virtual Meeting Room to the streaming address. This is done by adding the streaming address as a conference participant. You can do this either from the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface or from an Infinity Connect client connected to the VMR. Alternatively, for services that offer persistent URLs (such as with Periscope or YouTube) which therefore can be re-used for subsequent streams, you could set up the URL to be automatically dialed whenever a particular VMR is used.

    When using the Administrator interface (or a legacy Infinity Connect client), use the following settings:

    • Protocol: RTMP
    • Address: the address obtained from the streaming provider.
    • Role: we recommend selecting Guest (so that the streaming participant is not shown to other Guests in a Virtual Auditorium layout, and so that it does not keep a conference alive when all other Hosts have left).

    When using a next-generation Infinity Connect client, use the following settings:

    • Participant details: enter your RTMP alias e.g. rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/f4xx-547z-bg3w-0u7u

      Note that dial-out addresses placed via next-generation Infinity Connect clients that are prefixed with rtmp: are treated as a special case and therefore a Call Routing Rule is not required.

    • Role: we recommend selecting Guest.

  3. When Pexip Infinity has placed the call to the streaming service, the Streaming enabled icon is displayed to the right of the conference layout, and for Infinity Connect users the streaming participant appears in the participant list with a streaming badge next to its name: