Core features
Recording meetings
Cloud recording vs. local "save to my device" — how each works, what they produce, and how to share them.
Olivasal ships with two parallel recording modes, each producing the same three-file output: video, audio-only, and a chat transcript. Both can run at once.
Cloud recording (host only)
Server-side recording captured by the media server. The composite video is post-processed and produces:
recording.mp4— full meeting at 720p / 1080paudio.m4a— AAC stream-copied from the MP4 (no re-encode)chat.txt— flat plain-text transcript of every chat message
Camera-off participants render as call-UI initials avatars (a custom recording layout), so the composite never shows black tiles. Files live at /var/lib/olivasal/recordings/<roomId>/<sessionId>/; the host downloads them from the meeting detail page.
Trigger: the host clicks Record → Cloud, or the room has autoRecord enabled.
Speaker diarization
When AI recap is on, Olivasal also captures one audio file per speaker — so the transcript can attribute every line to a participant. Speaker pills then appear in the meeting detail and on shared recordings. (Per-speaker capture is CPU-heavy; it scales to roughly 4–5 concurrent speakers per box.)
Local recording (any participant)
Browser-side recording. The browser captures the meeting tab while mixing every audio track, and the client exports the chat transcript. All three files arrive as one ZIP:
olivasal-<room>-<timestamp>.zip
├── olivasal-<room>-video-<ts>.webm
├── olivasal-<room>-audio-<ts>.webm
└── olivasal-<room>-chat-<ts>.txt
Trigger: any participant clicks Record → Locally. Others see a ”🟡 N recording locally” pill broadcast over the data channel.
Sharing & retention
- Share link — generate a public
/share/recording/<token>viewer per recording. Per-share toggles control whether the AI summary, audit log, and MP4 download are exposed. - Recordings library — every recap is searchable (summary, transcript, action items, and room name) from the library.
- Encryption note — cloud recording and AI recap are unavailable while E2EE is on, since the server can’t read the media.
Choosing between them
- Cloud — best for compliance and shared archives. Files live on your infra.
- Local — best for personal copies. Nothing touches the server.