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Our Philosophy on Recordings: Why We Capture the Whole Picture

· 5 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

What is a meeting recording? Is it just a collection of video and audio streams? Or is it a faithful replica of a live, interactive experience?

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe a recording should be a perfect, trustworthy artifact. When you watch it back, the whiteboard annotations should appear at the exact moment the speaker was discussing them. The chat messages should pop up in perfect sync with the conversation. The shared presentation should be exactly as the audience saw it.

To achieve this perfect fidelity, we made a deliberate architectural choice for our recorder: we record the final, rendered output, not just the individual parts. This article explains why this headless Chrome-based approach, while CPU-intensive, is fundamentally better and more reliable than the alternatives.

The Alternative: The Fragile Puzzle of Component-Based Recording​

Many systems attempt to record meetings by capturing each data stream independently:

  • One file for each participant's audio.
  • Another file for each video stream.
  • A JSON or text file containing all the chat messages with timestamps.
  • A separate event log for all the whiteboard drawings, pointer movements, and slide changes.

On the surface, this seems efficient. But it creates a massive, fragile puzzle for post-processing. The system must then try to reassemble all these disparate pieces into a single, coherent video.

This approach is fraught with peril:

  • Synchronization Nightmares: What if a network hiccup causes a slight drift in the timestamps between the audio and the whiteboard events? The result is a recording where the presenter is pointing at something that isn't there yet.
  • Complexity in Playback: To view the "recording," you often need a special player that knows how to read all these separate files and reconstruct the session on the fly. The final output isn't a simple, portable video file.
  • Brittle and Not Future-Proof: If you add a new feature to your client, like emoji reactions, you also have to update your entire recording-processing logic to know how to handle and display this new "part."

This method doesn't create a recording; it creates a complex and fragile reconstruction that is only as good as its weakest link.

The Plug-N-Meet Way: Recording What You Actually See​

Our philosophy is simpler and far more robust. We believe the only way to perfectly capture a live event is to record it exactly as a human participant would experience it.

Here’s how we do it:

  1. When a recording is initiated, we launch a "virtual participant" into the meeting. This is a headless Chrome browser running on the server.
  2. This virtual user sees and hears everything exactly as a real person would. It sees the active speaker, the shared screen, the whiteboard drawings, and the chat messages as they appear, all rendered together in a single, final view.
  3. We then use the industry-standard ffmpeg to capture the output of this browser window, encoding it directly into a standard MP4 video file.

The result is a single, self-contained video file that is a perfect, high-fidelity replica of the live session. What you saw is what you get.

The Best of Both Worlds: Fidelity and Scalability​

We are transparent about the trade-off: running a headless browser and encoding video in real-time is a CPU-intensive task. In our previous architecture, this could mean that a server busy with post-processing a finished recording might have fewer resources available for new, live recordings.

We have completely solved this.

The new plugnmeet-recorder introduces Operational Modes, allowing you to decouple the recording pipeline.

  • You can run lightweight recorderOnly instances whose sole job is to join the meeting and capture the raw, high-fidelity stream. They use minimal CPU and are always ready for the next live session.
  • You can then run a separate fleet of transcoderOnly workers on different, even cheaper, servers. Their only job is to perform the CPU-intensive post-processing, converting the raw files into the final MP4s.

This architecture gives you the best of both worlds: the perfect fidelity of a headless Chrome recording and the scalability to offload the intensive work, ensuring your live meetings are never impacted.

Conclusion: A Commitment to Quality​

Our choice to use a headless browser for recordings is a direct reflection of our commitment to quality and reliability. A meeting recording is often a critical business asset or an essential educational resource. It needs to be perfect. By capturing the entire, rendered experience—and providing a scalable architecture to manage the workload—we ensure that your recordings are not just a collection of parts, but a trustworthy and professional record of what actually happened.

Ready to dive deeper into our recording architecture?