BBB Playback and Transcoding Into A Downloadable Video Format

[Chandler Weiner]

First off, I love BBB. As a tutor, it provides an excellent way for me to connect with my students no matter where they are. For my personal BBB usage, I don't need a dedicated server up and running all the time, so I use a cloud host that lets me save and restore entire instances from a snapshot. Because I will only be running the BBB server temporarily, my students do not have 24/7 access to their recorded sessions. I am looking to change that.

There are just a few features that I would love to see implemented to the BBB community at large, such as easy standardized video format output and creation. Ideally, I'd like to use ffmpeg to transcode all of the various aspects that go into making the Popcorn-readable output and create a standardized video file. 

This has lead me to read this: https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/FAQ#How_do_I_modify_the_default_playback_format?

Which says: 

"By modifying presentation.rb, you could, for example, exclude chat from the layout, add themes or colors, change the layout of the HTML5 web page, add a download link to the content, etc."

Unfortunately, Ruby is not a language I am fluent in, yet. Thus, I have a major question:

Is the modification of these two Ruby scripts what you use to offer the "Package #5" support at Blindside Networks? 

"Our hosting also provides you dial-in numbers to your sessions and the ability to download your recordings as video files, which you can then upload to YouTube or view on mobile devices." 

http://blindsidenetworks.com/support/

Please do not take this as any personal attack, BBB developers, but I am curious as to why a long requested feature of the open source BBB could have potentially made its way into the paid garden of Blindside Networks. I believe I can speak for a good number of users by asking if you could please explain the process by which Blindside has altered these Ruby files (or others) to allow for the creation and downloading of "standardized" non HTML5 video files. Is your process more manual, as explained here? If there is something else occurring  such as Matterhorn processing (which I have yet to try out) to render these files, then I would really love to know and pardon my naivete! What would I have to do to replicate this feature on my own?

Thank you for your help and creating such a wonderful product.

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Chandler,

> First off, I love BBB

Thanks for the love.  I am the product manager for BigBlueButton; I am responsible for the quality of each release.  

There have been eleven releases of BigBlueButton to-date.  Over the past five years (seven for some!) there have been a core group of developers working full-time on the project.  We believe that every student with a web browser should have access to a high-quality on-line learning experience.

We intend to make that possible with BigBlueButton.  As you are an on-line teacher we are, in many ways, building BigBlueButton for you.

> Please do not take this as any personal attack, BBB developers, but I am curious as to why a long requested feature of the open source BBB could have potentially made its way into the paid garden of Blindside Networks. 

I wear two hats: I am also the CEO of Blindside Networks.  No personal attack taken.  :-)  

Blindside Networks is the company that started the BigBlueButton project.  For a full history of the project, see

  http://bigbluebutton.org/history/ 

In these mailing lists, I prefer to wear my product manager hat.  As product manager of BigBlueButton, I'm not here to promote an individual company or service; rather, I am here to build a successful open source project and healthy ecosystem around it -- and I would argue one cannot exist without the other.  You can read more about my thoughts on this balance in an article I wrote for the Technology Innovation Management Review:

  http://timreview.ca/article/441  

Looking at your question, a more fundamental question is How could BigBlueButton exist as an open source project in the first place? In other words, why is it that BigBlueButton is open source when the vast majority of web conferencing systems are not, see link below

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software

To put it directly: how is it that so many developers have worked for so many years on building and improving BigBlueButton through each of its releases?  In other words, how do these guys (and gals) eat :-).

The answer is BigBlueButton exists because there is a healthy ecosystem around the project.  In the BigBlueButton ecosystem, there are a core group of developers that see the social benefit of BigBlueButton and the economic opportunities it creates.  Many of the developers work at Blindside Networks.  Full disclosure: if you examine the commits at

  https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/graphs/contributors

the develoers ritzalam, ffdixon, deniszgonjanin, markoscalderon, gugat, sebsschneider, jfederico, ryanseys, tylercopeland, kepstin, ielashi, omarshammas, chris-liu, mohamed-ahmed, and ScottMorris work (or have worked) at Blindside Networks.  

It's understandable that you see that a commercial company has developed an extension to BigBlueButton and ask "Why hasn't that company open sourced their extension?" 

In the case of the recordings, we have developed a separate workflow that takes the unmodified archive of a session from BigBlueButton and converts it into a video format.   The feature didn't "make it way" into the Blindside Networks, it was developed by Blindside Networks externally to the project.  Specifically, we developed a separate processing server to create the video file.  

The good news is that the creation of the video from a BigBlueButton recording is done.  We've tested it with thousands of recordings.  When we open source it (and yes, we will at some point), it's tested and ready to go.  We're not planning to open source it right now as it helps differentiate our hosting for BigBlueButton from others.

We, along with other companies, offer commercial services to support the BigBlueButton ecosystem, generate revenue, and, in turn, contribute back our time and skills to accelerate the development of BigBlueButton for the benefit of all.   Similar open source business models exists in Moodle, Sakai, Wordpress, Drupal, and other projects with a healthy ecosystems.

It's *really* important to the success of BigBlueButton that companies can successfully offer commercial services and generate revenue.  Without any means to generate revenue from an open source business model, it is hard to imagine that BigBlueButton would exist or, for that matter, have been open source.  

I know you will be disappointed to hear that a commercial company has developed something to complement BigBlueButton and isn't open sourcing it.  But I offer an alternative perspective.  There is a *lot* of work ahead on BigBlueButton, see

  https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/RoadMap1dot0

Because Blindside Networks exists, there exists a core group of developers are working hard to make it happen.  We're building BigBlueButton for you.

Finally, if you need commercial support, I invite you to contact *any* of the companies listed at:

  http://bigbluebutton.org/support

As I've said many times in these forums, for many of the companies listed above, the revenue they earn goes directly back into the development of BigBlueButton itself.  Blindside Networks is one such company.

Regards,... Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

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[michael...@ul.ie]

I hope people don't mind me joining in.

I appreciate the value to both the product and all users of having commercial support options but is there a danger that development will stagnate in areas of the product if its seen that either its not worth the time developing feature X or configuration Y as there is a commercial option available or that users don't realise its even a possibility when considering BBB because the option isn't advertised as being possible with BBB because its provided by a 3rd party and the necessary separation between advertising a 3rd party commercial offering (1 of many providers) and an open source project means the link never gets made and a user goes away thinking BBB isn't as great as others know it to be?

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[Fred Dixon]

Thanks for the feedback Michael!  

It would be great to hear from more members of the community in this thread.

Regards,... Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

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[Chandler Weiner]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my thread and open discussion, Fred. I certainly hope that this provides meaningful discussion to the community.

I understand the very important need to have a source of income from an open source project. And you're right, the offering of support and hosted services is how most companies do that. However, there is still a distinction between the projects you listed (Moodle, Sakai, Wordpress, Drupal) and BBB itself.

All of the other open source projects run their hosted businesses to provide additional reliability and ease of use to the customer. What they do not do is create features specifically for a company-hosted version of the product that is absent from the general open source project. Take Wordpress as a great example. Wordpress has their well known hosting at Wordpress.com that did, initially, only offer specific functionality that could only have occurred when running behind an Automattic DNS and private network, such as advanced analytics and monitoring. This provided a split: the free Wordpress couldn't get plugins and features that the walled garden for Wordpress.com could have. Now, the full functionality of Wordpress.com is completely open with the help of the Jetpack plugin, one of the most popular plugins to date. Even the "VIP" functionality of Wordpress.com is something that you could replicate on your own with W3 Total Cache, an S3 service, and properly selected cloud hosting. Wordpress.com truly uses the "Software as a service" model by providing hosted solutions and training alone, without pushing out a "limited" version of the project as open source and free. The only thing that I can think of that Automattic still keeps behind a paywall is their version of Liveblog, but that is not the only one de facto way to live blog, as others can step up and build something to replicate that paid feature. 

Services like this are not providing anything new for the hosted solution that you cannot get on the open source version. They are simply making it faster to get online with less overhead on the cost of the user. BBB requires some hefty hardware to run smoothly (in the age of virtualization and shared system resources), so Blindside can use that fact alone to leverage income.

Of course all of the open source projects that you pointed out are modular, allow plugins, and have easy-to-search directories of these plugins/extensions. BBB, in it's current iteration, does now allow for these swappable plugins and extensions, as any "plugins" (such as the Broadcast one) are built into the code, but just commented off. And this is an understandable design decision. Running BBB in Flash does not really allow for plugins to be easily swapped or added. Thus, I do not believe that Blindside Networks is truly acting in the same way as the other open source hosted solutions. Rather than develop an optimized network tuned to run BBB most effectively, Blindside chooses to run specialized builds of BBB (or the specialized BBB video-exporting server) creating a divide between the paid-for project (the one you actually would want) and the now lesser-useful open source project. This is honestly more like the Magento eCommerce project in its current state than it is Wordpress, Drupal, etc are.

Essentially, there is money to be made in support/training of the enterprise, as this has historically been the main money-drawer for these projects. There is a much smaller history of these projects offering outright features not present in the free version, at least in the modern versions of the products. 

Now, I am certainly not saying that 100% of all plugins and options must be open sourced as well. There is money to be made in plugins. Take WooCommerce as a great example (more Wordpress!). The framework is open source and allows for anyone to write to it, yet they have some pretty hefty paid plugins (with each plugin license only lasting one year) to extend the functionality for those non-savvy enough to do it themselves. BBB is not truly a framework, but rather a complete package. It would be much harder for developers outside of the Blindside Network team to be able to rewrite functionality in Ruby, Flash, etc. and essentially recompile a custom version of BBB.

At this point, you and I are well aware that plugins really aren't all that possible with the current implementation of BBB. So perhaps all I have said represent ideals that are only going to be present in HTML5 and beyond. But it certainly provides some food for thought with regards to Software As A Service. And, come to think of it, wouldn't you rather have the community extensively test new functionality for you for free in a release candidate than within the networks of your paid clients, where things could go wrong?

Essentially, my ideas regarding this boil down to the following, in order of how I would prefer to see things go:

1. BBB and all extensions/updates/plugins/ features are free and/or open sourced, or
2. BBB has their own hosted solutions through Blindside that offer the same functionality as the open BBB, just with hardware that has been specially tweaked and tuned, or
3. BBB (once this can occur) offers free and paid plugins to extend the functionality of the product. The hosted solution has the same plugins that the free option does

I say, follow Redhat, Automattic, Suse, Wordpress and others to truly offer support/hosting for those who need it, while keeping the free product open source, available, strong, and extendable.

Thank you for your time and for truly developing BBB for online teachers like me. I honestly cannot wait to see the amazing direction this project is destined to head in.

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Chandler,

Thanks for your comments.  My thoughts below.

> All of the other open source projects run their hosted businesses to provide additional reliability and ease of use to the customer. 

When we decided to open source BigBlueButton, we also made a conscious decision that BigBlueButton Inc. (the legal entity owning the copyright, trademark, and license) would be a not-for-profit entity.  See

    http://bigbluebutton.org/2010/07/12/bigbluebutton-foundation/

As a not-for-profit, there would be no commercial arm of BigBlueButton offering hosting (as in wordpress.com).

Our intent is to model BigBlueButton Inc. after the Eclipse Foundation.  The Eclipse Foundation is a membership based organization that serves to grow the Eclipse ecosystem of users, developers, and commercial companies.  It does not compete with the commercial companies; rather, supports them in building a world-wide ecosystem.  

We've been working on getting BigBlueButton Inc. started in a similar manner for a number of years now.   You'll be hearing more about it in 2014.

> Blindside chooses to run specialized builds of BBB (or the specialized BBB video-exporting server) 

I can share that Blindside Networks sets up a BigBlueButton server following the same steps covered in

   https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/InstallationUbuntu

BigBlueButton is very configurable.  The record and playback process are, by design, extensible.  Anyone can copy the scripts and create a new custom recording format.   That’s what we did.

Since we're running the same build, we're constantly testing BigBlueButton itself with a large group of users, finding bugs, and fixing them.  Case in point: we tested the core record and playback scripts (which generates the built-in presentation format) for months now on our servers with thousands of recordings, fixing increasing edge cases and improving the scripts through the numerous beta and release candidates until the final release for 0.81.  

> ... creating a divide between the paid-for project (the one you actually would want) and the now lesser-useful open source project.

I would offer an alternative perspective.  

There are, in fact, many companies that have BigBlueButton into their commercial offering, extended it in proprietary ways, and are generating revenue.  Some have chosen to open source their offerings, some have not.

Realistically, we made this possible by choosing the LGPL license for BigBlueButton.  

With LGPL, a company is not required to open source their enhancements to the code base unless they distribute the derivative work to another company.   Hosting an LGPL-based product does not constituent distribution (which is how Google and other companies build upon open source software).  Even more so, with LGPL, if a company embeds BigBlueButton in their product and does distribute, the LGPL does not require them to open source their proprietary components (not derived from BigBlueButton) (unlike the GPL).  See

  http://bigbluebutton.org/open-source-license/

   

There is an open source license that does require companies to open source their derivative works in hosted only environments: the AGPL license.  Blindside Networks had initially flirted with the AGPL license for the desktop sharing component of BigBlueButton.

  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bigbluebutton-users/IbqCJMO7S_U

I can share with you that we had made some revenue from offering a commercial licenses for its desktop sharing (and in the early days that revenue kept us going), but we decided it was not good for the community and open sourced the desktop sharing as LGPL.  See

   https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bigbluebutton-dev/oMI1au18HTI/1ej4l-Bcl2IJ

Looking back, I think this was the right choice.  As more companies used desktop sharing, the improvements to it accelerated, for the benefit of everyone.

Many companies do, in fact, contribute their extensions back to the community (the glass is more than half full).  For example, components such enhancements to desktop sharing, JavaScript API for BigBlueButton, and the text tool for whiteboard have all come from commercial companies.   

What's more important, and not immediately obvious, is when a company embeds BigBlueButton into their commercial product, they invariably put BigBlueButton thought their Q&A process.  This has occurred many times over the past few years and contributed to the overall quality of the product. 

> Essentially, there is money to be made in support/training of the enterprise, as this has historically been the main money-drawer for these projects.

I agree, but as BigBlueButton Inc. is not-for-profit, it thus it falls to the commercial companies in the ecosystem to offer such services.

To respond to your points directly:

> 1. BBB and all extensions/updates/plugins/ features are free and/or open sourced, or

The license is LGPL, so it’s very permissive for companies to build proprietary extensions.  This will happen.  We believe, in the long run, the project benefits from having many commercial companies building solutions upon BigBlueButton, which accelerates both the development and the overall quality of the project. 

> 2. BBB has their own hosted solutions through Blindside that offer the same functionality as the open BBB, just with hardware that has been specially tweaked and tuned, or

BigBlueButton Inc. will not be offering BigBlueButton hosting as it would compete with the commercial companies.  

> 3. BBB (once this can occur) offers free and paid plugins to extend the functionality of the product. The hosted solution has the same plugins that the free option does

Same answer as (2).  

  

Ultimately, we want a very healthy community of users, developers, and commercial companies all benefiting from and contributing to BigBlueButton, with the BigBlueButton Inc. supporting and accelerating growth of that community.

Thanks again Chandler for your comments and feedback!

Regards,.. Fred

-- 
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

--

[michael...@ul.ie]

Hi Fred, Chandler,

Could I suggest then in the spirit of eclipse's plugin site http://marketplace.eclipse.org/#search that bigbluebutton.org include an "Extend" or "Expand" section on its site that starts to collect and act as a reference to the various additions available and the licensing conditions that apply like the blindside networks recording extension in advance of any formal plugin framework, I would see the integration options being housed here also but its more about extending the feature set than "support" as the integrations are currently classified as. The option to filter by function,license type and supported BBB version would be handy like eclipse plugins can be sorted by commercial, Free, Open Source, LGPL 

My initial visits to the home site point to extending BBB  by being a developer (which I'm not) or buying support from external parties to keep the system up, I wasn't aware that some of those companies offered additional functionality and I'm assuming there are gems (in the value sense not the code sense) in the forums that could  do with a more public home to live, The extend or  expand section would only go to highlight that there could be a market for feature X or Y for the developer with the skills necessary to create it or drive the product forward by highlighting beta extensions that could belong in the next core release but need to be road tested for those willing to do some config file editing and a bit of copy and paste (until a standard plugin feature is added to core) but don't fancy the whole "just grab the bits from the source repo" . Over time the space could develop into the BBB marketplace that's integrated into the product like the eclipse plugin can be searched online or from within the IDE itself benefiting the end user and the commercial entities offering their services

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[I Capatosta]

I ALMOST walked away - I'm still struggling to find how best to deploy BBB. I'd love some commercial support but its not in our budget. That may change if I can deploy BBB and my organization starts using it.  - BIG IF

[German Acevedo]

Hi Chandler,

I have been looking for the same, a way to have recordings in a format that can be shared, and found this Chrome Extension that is making the job with a couple of clicks and working really nice: Screencastify (Screen Video Recorder) you can find it in the webstore or try this link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screencastify-screen-vide/mmeijimgabbpbgpdklnllpncmdofkcpn

Hope this help.

Regards,

German