2 posts tagged with "philosophy"

For years, our company has been a well-known provider of BigBlueButton hosting and support services. We've deployed, managed, and scaled it for countless clients, and we have a deep respect for the role it has played in the open-source education community. It paved the way.

But after years in the trenches, supporting live sessions, online classes, and events at scale, we found ourselves running into the same fundamental walls. We weren't just using the software; we were experiencing its architectural limits firsthand. The frustration wasn't just about bugs; it was about an architecture that, while powerful for its original purpose, presented challenges for the kind of elastic scalability and developer agility that modern web applications demand.

We realized we had a choice: continue building workarounds, or take everything we had learned and build the solution we knew our users needed.

We chose to build. This is the story of why Plug-N-Meet exists.

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.