Recording

One highly sought-after feature in many communication applications is call recording. Whether it's for legal compliance, quality assurance, or simply for future reference, the ability to record calls is essential in numerous scenarios.

This documentation article serves as a guide for implementing a call recording feature in your application. We will explore the technical aspects and best practices involved in capturing and storing recording data during calls.

Recording calls

The Call objects exposes the call recording API. To start recording, we simply invoke call.startRecording(). To stop recording, we use call.stopRecording(). To determine, whether a call recording is in progress, we use call.state.recording$ Observable. This may serve us well, when we want to provide visual clues about the recording state. We have to be aware, that it can take few moments until a call recording starts. We recommend to keep own state signalling that the call recording is starting, but has not begun yet.

import { Call } from '@stream-io/video-client';

let call: Call;
await call.startRecording();

// to stop the recording
await call.stopRecording();

Permissions

To start and stop recording, the user has to have corresponding permissions.

import { Call, OwnCapability } from '@stream-io/video-client';
let call: Call;

if (call.permissionsContext.hasPermission(OwnCapability.START_RECORD_CALL)) {
  await call.startRecording();
} else {
  // handle lack of permissions
}

// to stop the recording
if (call.permissionsContext.hasPermission(OwnCapability.STOP_RECORD_CALL)) {
  await call.stopRecording();
} else {
  // handle lack of permissions
}

To learn more about permissions, take a look at our permissions guide.

Acquiring call recordings data

The call recording data can be retrieved by calling the Call method queryRecordings(). By default, it retrieves all the call recordings for a given call. However, it accepts a single argument callSessionId that allows us to retrieve only recordings done during a single call session. The method returns ListRecordingsResponse that carries an array of CallRecording objects accessible through recordings key.

note

Multiple recordings can be made during a single call session, but a single call CID can be reused for multiple sessions, too.

If we wanted to keep and up-to-date list of call recordings during an active call, we would need to query them at the start of the call as well as with every call.recording_stopped event.

note

The call recording is not immediately available when the call.recording_stopped event is delivered. It may take 30 or more seconds for a recording to be available. Once the recording is available, we will be notified with call.recording_ready event.