Isolating Big Blue Button Video

This is a quick how to on manually connecting to a BBB video stream. Before we begin, here’s a very, very quick background.

  • Video streams are grouped under a conference-room specific url that has for format rtmp://host/video/roomID
  • Each streaming component under BBB is available as a separate stream (ie, video, desktop, sip/audio, etc)
  • BBB uses red5 under the hood to manage these streams
  • Grab flowplayer here and the flowplayer rtmp client here
  1. Connect to your room and start your webcam.
  2. Tail /usr/share/red5/log/bigbluebutton.log and uou should see the following log lines:
    2011-07-11 18:14:54,871 [NioProcessor-1] DEBUG o.b.c.s.p.ParticipantsEventRecorder - A participant's status has changed 141 streamName 640x480141
    2011-07-11 18:14:54,919 [NioProcessor-1] DEBUG o.b.c.s.p.ParticipantsService - Setting participant status ec0449a0-b5d1-4ca5-bfdf-d118d8bc2299 141 hasStream true
    • ec0449a0-b5d1-4ca5-bfdf-d118d8bc2299 or similar is the room id
    • 640×480141 is the stream id you need
  3. Download and place flowplayer-…swf, flowplayer.rtmp-…swf, and flowplayer-…min.js into a directory.
  4. Create a web page as follows:
  5. 
           
           Minimal Flowplayer setup
    
    
    
  6. Load up your web page and you should see the streaming video.

2 thoughts on “Isolating Big Blue Button Video”

  1. Very cool! I’m wondering what would be involved in going the other direction… injecting a video/audio stream INTO a conference?

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