Big Blue Button (BBB) Downloader

Downloads a BBB lesson as MP4 video, including presentation, audio, webcam and screenshare.

Nevertheless, I would definitely recommend you to record a BBB meeting with OBS, it's more efficient and you have more control over the outcome.

Setup

1. Install Python >=3.7
2. Install ffmpeg
3. Run: pip install bbb-dl as administrator

Usage

usage: bbb-dl [-h] [-aw] [-aa] [-kt] [-v] [-ncc] [--version] [--encoder ENCODER] [--audiocodec AUDIOCODEC] [-f FILENAME] URL

Big Blue Button Downloader that downloads a BBB lesson as MP4 video

positional arguments:
  URL                   URL of a BBB lesson

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -aw, --add-webcam     add the webcam video as an overlay to the final video
  -aa, --add-annotations
                        add the annotations of the professor to the final video
  -kt, --keep-tmp-files
                        keep the temporary files after finish
  -v, --verbose         print more verbose debug informations
  -ncc, --no-check-certificate
                        Suppress HTTPS certificate validation
  --version             Print program version and exit
  --encoder ENCODER     Optional encoder to pass to ffmpeg (default libx264)
  --audiocodec AUDIOCODEC
                        Optional audiocodec to pass to ffmpeg (default copy the codec from the original source)
  -f FILENAME, --filename FILENAME
                        Optional output filename

How can I speed up the rendering process?

FFmpeg can use different hardware accelerators for encoding videos. You can find more information about this here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro

To use such hardware for encoding you may need to install drivers as indicated on the website and then set the --encoder option to the appropriate encoder.

For example, if you have an Nvidia graphics card installed in a computer, you can use it with the NVENC encoder. For this you simply set the option --encoder h264_nvenc. You can see on the Nvidia website which graphics cards support this option. If your graphics card also supports H.265 (HEVC) you can set the option --encoder hevc_nvenc instead, which might be even faster (you have to test this yourself).

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.0. For further information, please look here or here^(DE).

This project is based on the work of CreateWebinar.com, Stefan Wallentowitz and Olivier Berger. Parts of this code have already been published under MIT license and public domain. These parts are re-released in this project under the GPL-2.0 License.