With Stream Recording you can keep a copy of a real-time stream where media can be used for a variety of use cases such as video on demand (VOD) playback, archiving and auditing, event highlights and instant replay, etc. To support this variety of purposes there are options for the type of media assets that you will create from a stream.

• Recordings are full-length copies of a stream that will be processed and made available shortly after a broadcast is complete.
• Live Clips are media files from a broadcast stream that can be processed and retrieved immediately while the live stream is still in progress.

You can work with recordings and clips either from the Streaming Dashboard or using the Media Assets REST API.

How It Works

The collection of recordings and clips is referred to more broadly as Media Assets that have been created from your account. There are a few concepts to understand to make best use of the feature.

When a Publish Token is enabled with recording or clipping, the system will generate a timeline for each incoming source. For simple streams, this may be a single broadcast source but for more complex workflows with multi-bitrate contribution and multi-view applications that have multiple sources there may be more than one timeline. The timeline is a series of buffered segments that are kept in a cache so that they can be stored as a recording or a clip later. When a stream goes offline, one timeline ends and if it reconnects a new one begins.

There are costs associated with storage, so you can configure expiration rules for how long you want to maintain availability of a media stream and storage profiles so that you can have the service transfer files to your own preferred storage provider (AWS S3, GCS, etc.)

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Additional Charges - Storage

This feature will incur additional charges for cloud storage. If you would like to use this capability on your projects, please be aware of the pricing impact or reach out to your sales/solutions contact with any questions.

Review Pricing for additional details.

Enable Recording and/or Clipping

You must configure a Publish Token prior to beginning a broadcast to enable the capture of media.

For more detailed instructions, review one of the following tutorials:

Finding Your Media

You can find both recordings and clips in the Streaming Dashboard or by calling the Media Assets REST endpoint.

For more detailed instructions, review one of the following tutorials:

Media Properties

Media assets will have matching resolution and bitrate of the broadcasted stream. Any degradation of the broadcast stream due to bad network conditions will persist, however any client playback issues that result from adaptive bitrate playback will not impact the recordings or clips.

The video and audio codecs used during the broadcast will be reflected in the archived media assets.

We recommend that encoding settings use an I-Frame period of 1s when using the service to increase precision when aligning keyframes with media segments.

Troubleshooting

To diagnose recording issues, such as missing recordings, review the details of the publishing settings, such as:

• Protocol: RTMP, SRT, WebRTC, or WHIP
• Encoder: Hardware and software type with version details
• Settings: Bitrate, FPS, Resolution, or Simulcast setting
• Network: Details about the network used. For example, a cellular connection may create issues with fluctuations in the network.

Multi-source

When using multi-source broadcasting, multiple independent broadcast timelines will be created.

For clip assets you can identify the specific source from which to clip, or if not specified multiple clips will be created.

For recording assets, you will get a discrete media file for each source.

You will need to use a separate media tool (such as Dolby.io Media Transcode API) if you want to automate any transizing, transrating, or stitching operations.

Media Duration

There are some limits to how large any individual media asset will be.

For long-running streams that exceed 12 hours, multiple media assets will be created.

Media Expiration

Consideration should be made on how long you may want to store media before it expires and is no longer available for retrieval.

Missing Audio for 5.1

When publishing streams using 5.1 audio format, the audio is present on the viewer live stream, but not preserved in the recording. Multi-channel audio is currently not preserved in the recording archive. The audio is only present in the recording archive if using stereo and mono formats. Multi-source stream audio is also affected if the URL is set to &videoOnly.

Dashboard Recording Error

If the dashboard displays recording errors, contact the Dolby support team and specify as many of your publishing settings as possible.

Learn More

Learn more by exploring the specification, developer blog and code samples.