What is Jibri

Jibri is a set of tools for recording and/or streaming a Jitsi Meet conference. It is currently very experimental.

It works by launching a Chrome instance rendered in a virtual framebuffer and capturing and encoding the output with ffmpeg. It is intended to be run on a separate machine (or a VM), with no other applications using the display or audio devices.

Jibri consists of two parts:

1. A set of scripts to start/stop all needed services

These reside in scripts. They start and stop the X server, window manager, ffmpeg and the browser processes.

2. An XMPP client

This is a simple XMPP client which resides in jibri-xmpp-client. It provides an external interface for the recording functionality. It connects to a set of XMPP servers, enters a pre-defined MUC on each, advertises its status there, and accepts commands (start/stop recording) coming from a controlling agent (i.e. jicofo).

Using Jibri

These are some very rough notes on how to setup a machine for jibri:

• Make sure the user you use is in all needed groups. Not sure which ones are required, but they're a subset of {ubuntu, adm, dialout, cdrom, floppy, sudo, audio, dip, video, plugdev, netdev}.

• Load the needed alsa-modules: modprobe snd-aloop

• Copy asoundrc to ~/.asoundrc

• Ensure that the latest ffmpeg is installed:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

• Install all required software (TODO: check for missing software, include instructions)

  • alsa + snd_aloop
  • pulse
  • Xorg, video-dummy
  • icewm
  • chrome/chromium
  • chromedriver
  • python (pip): selenium
  • ffmpeg (preferably the real thing, not libav)
  • mplayer, imagemagick

Running

Manually

./scripts/launch_recording.sh <URL> <OUTPUT_FILENAME> [TOKEN] [YOUTUBE_STREAM_ID]

• URL is the address of the Jitsi Meet conference.
• OUTPUT_FILENAME is the name of the output file.
• TOKEN is ignored.
• YOUTUBE_STREAM_ID is the ID of the youtube stream to use (accessible from the youtube interface). If provided, this will replace OUTPUT_FILENAME.

With the XMPP client:

You need to:

• Run this branch of jicofo: https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo/tree/ngenso
• Configure the Jitsi Meet client to use jibri (?)
• Run jibri-xmpp-client (see jibri-xmpp-client/README

Troubleshooting

• If a pulse process uses too much CPU, try disabling some stuff in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

  • load-module module-filter-heuristics
  • load-module module-filter-apply

• To remove the mouse pointer (more like kill the mouse itself with an RPG): rmmod psmouse

• To see if recording audio works:

  1. Play something
  2. Record. The default ALSA playback device is hw:0,0. Its corresponding capture device is hw:0,1. If something is already playing (hw:0:0 is open) you may need to match its settings with the -f, -c and -r arguments to arecord. 2A. arecord -D hw:0,1,0 -f S16_LE -c 2 -r 44100 test.wav 2B. ffmpeg -f alsa -i hw:0,1,0 test.wav
  3. Play something
  4. See if something was recorded with xxd test.wav | grep -v ' 0000 ' | wc -l. You should see more than one line.

• To record to a file instead of youtube, give start-ffmpeg.sh a local file name (flv) in $1.