Dasmeet Blog

Why your meeting recording should be yours, as an MP4

Dasmeet Ekibi — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

When a session ends, the most valuable thing left behind is the recording. The person who could not attend watches it, the organizer reviews their own delivery, the organisation files it in its archive. Even so, many video conferencing products only show the recording in their own player; downloading the file costs extra or is not possible at all.

At Dasmeet we made this part of the foundation: the MP4 recording of every session is a free download on every plan.

What a player-locked recording costs you

BigBlueButton's default recording is not a single video file; presentation, audio, whiteboard strokes and chat are stored as separate layers and composed in the browser at playback time. It is a rich experience, but it has three practical problems:

You cannot move the recording to another system (LMS, video archive, sharing platform).
The day you leave the service, the recordings leave with it.
Playback struggles on mobile devices and weak connections.

What MP4 changes

MP4 is the common language every browser, every phone and every LMS can play today. Once you download it:

It goes into your own archive; retention and access rules are your decision.
You upload it to Moodle, Canvas or your corporate portal as a plain file.
You trim it, add subtitles; the file is yours.

How it works

When a session ends, BigBlueButton processes the recording; depending on the session length this takes minutes or hours. Once processing finishes, Dasmeet converts the recording to MP4 and makes it available in the panel. For organisations working through the API, the same file is listed as a format in the getRecordings response; your existing LMS plugin already shows it.

Why free

Making the recording a plan-dependent privilege means forcing an organisation to pay for access to its own data. We do not think that is right. The data belongs to the organisation; we run the infrastructure. We treat this as an assumption of the product, not a line in the price list.

Connecting Moodle to Dasmeet, step by step

Dasmeet Ekibi — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Moodle is one of the few LMSs that supports BigBlueButton in core: the BigBlueButtonBN activity module has been built in since 4.0. Because Dasmeet is fully compatible with the BigBlueButton API, connecting Moodle means changing exactly two fields.

First: get your API details

In the Dasmeet panel, open Integrations. You will see two values for your organisation:

Server URL — a BigBlueButton endpoint dedicated to your organisation.
Shared secret — the secret that signs API calls. Do not share it; if you suspect it has leaked, rotate it from the panel.

Change the setting in Moodle

Sign in to Moodle as an administrator.
Go to Site administration → Plugins → Activity modules → BigBlueButton.
Enter the Dasmeet server URL in BigBlueButton Server URL.
Enter the shared secret in BigBlueButton Shared Secret.
Save. The connection status notice at the top of the page should turn green.

That is all. Every existing BigBlueButton activity runs through Dasmeet from the next launch.

Branding and defaults

Meetings launched from Moodle also receive the logo, colours and default settings you defined in the panel. Nothing extra is needed on the Moodle side; Dasmeet adds these settings while handling the create call.

Recordings

After a session ends, the Recordings table on the Moodle activity page fills in. The MP4 format appears as a column; participants can download it directly. Deleting a recording is also done from Moodle and is reflected on the Dasmeet side.

Two common situations

"Could not connect" notice: usually a leading or trailing space in the secret. Clear the field and paste again.

An old meeting is still on the old server: the setting change only affects newly created sessions. If a session is open, wait for it to end.

Choosing a data location: why organisations ask

Dasmeet Mühendislik — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Until a few years ago, choosing a video conferencing service was a conversation about quality and price. Today most organisational conversations open with a different question: where does the data live? In this article we look at the reasons behind the question and the two different answers Dasmeet gives.

Why it matters

A meeting recording contains people's faces, voices, names and often the documents they shared. That places it squarely in the middle of personal data protection. Regulations such as KVKK in Türkiye and GDPR in Europe define in which country data is processed and under what conditions it may be transferred abroad. An organisation's legal team expects a clear answer from the provider.

Beyond regulation there is a practical side: a server close to the data means lower latency. A server near the participants' country directly affects audio and video quality.

What happens on shared infrastructure

In the shared model, several organisations use the same pool of servers. Each organisation's meetings, recordings and users are logically separated: an administrator from one organisation cannot reach any data of another. This separation is enforced at every layer of the software and tested separately for every new feature.

The country where the shared infrastructure is located is stated in the service description; the organisation decides with that information.

What changes with a dedicated server

For an organisation that wants a dedicated server, reserved capacity is set up and the data location is the organisation's choice. Data that must stay in Türkiye is processed on a server in Türkiye; when another country is required, that country is chosen. Recordings are stored in the same region.

This model makes sense for:

Public bodies and affiliated institutions with restrictions on transferring data abroad
Companies delivering training in regulated sectors such as healthcare and finance
Education providers whose own contracts commit to a data location

Questions to ask

Whichever provider you talk to, ask these four questions: In which country is data processed? Where are recordings stored? How is separation between organisations enforced and tested? How do I take my data when I leave? Our answer to the last one is simple: your recordings are already with you, as MP4 files.

Breakout groups: splitting a large session into small conversations

Dasmeet Ekibi — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The most frequently mentioned weakness of online sessions is interaction: cameras off, microphones muted, the organizer talking alone. BigBlueButton's breakout rooms are one of the most effective answers to that problem, and they are available in every Dasmeet session.

What the feature does

The organizer splits the main session into small rooms that run for a set time. Participants are distributed randomly or by hand; each room has its own audio, video, whiteboard and shared notes. When time runs out the rooms close and everyone returns to the main session. The organizer can enter and leave any room.

Three patterns that work

1. Think first, then share

A question is posed, discussed for five minutes in rooms of two or three, then each room shares its conclusion in one sentence back in the main session. Keep it short; long rooms drift.

2. Practice workshop

Participants solve a task together in groups of four or five. Each room's shared notes become the result document; the organizer collects them at the end.

3. One-to-one feedback

While the large group works, the organizer holds short conversations in two-person rooms. The remaining participants stay busy with a task in the main session.

Details that matter

Announce the duration before splitting; the timer is visible inside the room, but expectations should be set first.
Different presentations can be loaded into different rooms. Giving each group a different question diversifies the discussion.
Letting participants choose their own room (BigBlueButton 2.6+) increases engagement.
The recording covers the main session; rooms are not recorded. Have groups write their output into shared notes.

Combine with polls

When the groups return, open a quick poll: "Which answer did your group reach?" The result appears over the presentation and the discussion continues from there. Used together, polls and breakout rooms can turn even a forty-person session into a live conversation.

Let participants see you: organisation branding in the meeting experience

Dasmeet Ekibi — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 GMT

For an organisation, meeting software is not a tool but part of the experience. When a participant clicks the training link, do they see the organisation's logo, or a third party's welcome screen? That detail affects trust and belonging. In Dasmeet, every organisation works under its own brand.

What can be customised

Logo: separate logos can be uploaded for light and dark themes. They appear in the panel, on the sign-in screen and in the top left of the meeting room.
Colour: a brand colour and an accent colour are entered as two values. The panel derives an accessible scale from them; buttons, links and selection colours follow.
Favicon and page title: the browser tab shows the organisation's name and icon.
Default meeting settings: recording on or off, whether participants join with camera, whether there is a waiting room. Set once at organisation level, applied to every meeting.
Welcome and exit text: the welcome message at the start of a meeting and the note after leaving are written in the organisation's own words.

Why colours are "two values"

A single brand colour is not enough; text on light backgrounds, button colour in dark mode, focus rings and dozens of other derivatives are needed. Instead of asking for each one, the organisation enters two colours and the system generates the rest in the OKLCH colour space, checking that every derivative has sufficient contrast. The "our brand colour is light yellow and the text is unreadable" problem never appears.

The meeting room is branded too

Branding does not stop at the panel. When Dasmeet creates a meeting it passes the logo and colour information to BigBlueButton; the participant sees the organisation's identity in the meeting room as well. This also applies to meetings launched from an LMS such as Moodle.

What is not customised

To be honest: the layout of the meeting room, the toolbar and the whiteboard are BigBlueButton itself and are not changed. Customisation concentrates on the elements that carry identity (logo, colour, text, defaults). That boundary is what lets every organisation receive the same reliable meeting experience.

Infrastructure that scales with load: behind the scenes

Dasmeet Mühendislik — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Video conferencing load is not a flat line. At education providers it peaks in the morning and evening and drops at the weekend; at companies, quarter-end meetings pile up. With a fixed number of servers there are two ways to meet that wave: buy for the peak and leave servers idle most of the time, or buy for the average and lose quality at the peak. Neither is good.

The pool and the dispatcher

In Dasmeet, meetings do not run on a single BigBlueButton server but in a server pool. Every new meeting is placed on the most suitable server by a dispatcher that looks at the current load of each server in the pool. Participants never see this; the link is the same.

Growing

When the total load of the pool crosses a defined threshold, a new server is started, BigBlueButton is installed and configured automatically, and once the server passes its health check it joins the pool. This takes minutes, so the threshold is set to trigger before the peak. A margin of spare capacity is always kept in the pool to absorb sudden spikes.

Shrinking: the part that needs care

Shutting a server down is harder than starting one. A BigBlueButton server keeps processing recordings even after the meeting on it has ended; depending on the session length this can take minutes or hours. Shutting down a server whose recording has not been processed means losing the recording.

That is why the shrink step goes through a checklist: is there an open meeting on the server, is a recording waiting to be processed, have processed recordings been moved to permanent storage, has the transfer been verified? Only when everything checks out is the server first removed from the pool (it accepts no new meetings) and then shut down. No step is skipped; "probably done" is not enough.

The journey of a recording

A processed recording does not stay on the server; it is moved to permanent object storage, where the MP4 format is kept ready. So even if the server is shut down, the recording remains accessible. The download link you see in the panel or in your LMS points to that permanent storage.

What this gives you

Session quality does not drop at peak hours, you do not pay for idle capacity in quiet hours, and your recordings are safe regardless of a server's lifetime. You think about your session, not the infrastructure.