lkiesow::weblog

Random notes from a security-aware software engineer, open-source advocate and occasional lecturer.

Integrate BigBlueButton with Opencast

This is a short guide of how to integrate BigBlueButton with Opencas:

The Tools

The Idea

Opencast is incredible when it comes to automated video processing and publication while BigBlueButton is a very nice tool for web conferencing and online lectures which does support recordings. The idea is to combine these two systems so that recordings from BigBlueButton will end up in Opencast, will be processed and finally published to the same locations other content will end up as well (Opencast has a nice integration into many LMS and to some video portals).

To reach this goal, we will add a simple small post-processing script to BigBlueButton which will then upload it’s recordings to Opencast as a final step.

The Integration Script

What we want to add in BigBlueButton is a post processing script as described in the documentation. This script should be located at (there should already be an example script in that folder):

/usr/local/bigbluebutton/core/scripts/post_publish/post_publish.rb

The following script will simply take the recordings and upload them to Opencast. Just update the Opencast server settings so that they point to your server:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# encoding: UTF-8

require "shellwords"
require "trollop"
require File.expand_path('../../../lib/recordandplayback', __FILE__)

opts = Trollop::options do
  opt :meeting_id, "Meeting id to archive", :type => String
end
meeting_id = opts[:meeting_id]

### opencast configuration begin

# Server URL
# oc_server = 'https://develop.opencast.org'
oc_server = 'https://develop.opencast.org'

# User credentials allowed to ingest via HTTP basic
# oc_user = 'username:password'
oc_user = 'admin:opencast'

# Workflow to use for ingest
# oc_workflow = 'schedule-and-upload'
oc_workflow = 'schedule-and-upload'

### opencast configuration end


logger = Logger.new("/var/log/bigbluebutton/post_publish.log", 'weekly' )
logger.level = Logger::INFO
BigBlueButton.logger = logger

published_files = "/var/bigbluebutton/published/presentation/#{meeting_id}"
meeting_metadata = BigBlueButton::Events.get_meeting_metadata("/var/bigbluebutton/recording/raw/#{meeting_id}/events.xml")

#
# Put your code here
#
BigBlueButton.logger.info("Upload Recording for [#{meeting_id}]...")

ingest = false
presenter = ''
presentation = ''
title = Shellwords.escape(meeting_metadata['meetingName'])
oc_user = Shellwords.escape(oc_user)

if (File.exists?(published_files + '/video/webcams.webm'))
  BigBlueButton.logger.info("Found presenter video")
  ingest = true
  presenter = "-F 'flavor=presentater/source' -F 'BODY1=@#{published_files + '/video/webcams.webm'}'"
end
if (File.exists?(published_files + '/deskshare/deskshare.webm'))
  BigBlueButton.logger.info("Found presentation video")
  ingest = true
  presentation = "-F 'flavor=presentation/source' -F 'BODY2=@#{published_files + '/deskshare/deskshare.webm'}'"
end
if (ingest)
  BigBlueButton.logger.info("Uploading...")
  puts `curl -u '#{oc_user}' "#{oc_server}/ingest/addMediaPackage/#{oc_workflow}" #{presenter} #{presentation} -F title="#{title}"`
end
BigBlueButton.logger.info("Upload for [#{meeting_id}] ends")

exit 0

You can also just download post_publish.rb.

Limitations

This is a very simple integration, but should work just fine. Nevertheless, there are a few limitations.

Have fun.

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