Ultimate Guide of How to Record a Session on BigBlueButton

Recording BigBlueButton sessions is essential for maximizing the value of virtual learning and collaboration. By capturing meetings and lectures, participants can revisit discussions for review, ensuring better comprehension and retention of material. Recordings also serve as a reliable tool for tracking attendance, allowing educators and administrators to verify participation without manual effort. Beyond immediate use, archived sessions create a long-term resource library that can be referenced for future training, compliance, or knowledge sharing. Do you want to know efficient ways to do this? This article will share 2 ways to record sessions in BigBlueButton.

Method 1: Record BigBlueButton as a Moderator (The Official Way)

BigBlueButton offers a recording feature to capture the session for students who were not originally invited to the video conference. If you are the Moderator, you can handily record a session on BigBlueButton.

1. After the BigBlueButton recording feature is enabled, you are allowed to engage the Start/Stop button in the live session to generate a recording, as a Moderator. So, before you record a session on BigBlueButton, you need to check the Session can be recorded option.

Just enter BigBlueButton, go to the activity settings, select the Room/Activity with recordings in General settings, and then ensure the Session can be recorded is enabled.

2. When you hold a BigBlueButton session, you can see a Start recording button appears on the top part of the window. Click on it to start capturing the activity on BigBlueButton. You need to click Yes in the next pop-up window to confirm the BigBlueButton recording.

3. The record button will change to the red recording condition, and you can see a prompting message, This session is now being recorded.

4. To pause or stop the BigBlueButton recording, you can simply click on the record button. Click Yes in the Pause recording window. BigBlueButton will prompt that, This session is not being recorded anymore.

You can also choose the End Meeting option from the Settings drop-down menu to finish the recording.

You can find your BigBlueButton recordings in the Recorded Sessions section of your meeting dashboard or LMS integration. Be aware that recordings often take time to process before they appear—sometimes minutes, sometimes hours depending on server load. Once they’re published, you can play them back online or download/export them if your setup allows. Patience during the processing delay ensures you’ll have reliable access to your recordings for review, sharing, or archival.

Method 2: Record BigBlueButton as a Participant (Third-Party Tool)

Because the captured BigBlueButton session is saved online on BigBlueButton cloud service, so it will take a long time to generate your recording. That's why many users can't locate their BigBlueButton recordings. What's worse, as a participant, you are not allowed to directly record on BigBlueButton without permission.

Here we strongly recommend a powerful BigBlueButton session recording tool, Screen Recorder for you. It has the capability to record any activities happened on your computer, including various sessions and video conferences on BigBlueButton, online meetings, video/audio calls, webinars, and more. It can record BigBlueButton session with high quality even up to 4K.

1. Free download, install and open this BigBlueButton recorder on your computer, either a Windows 10/8/7 PC or a Mac. Choose the Video Recorder feature.

2. You can freely adjust the screen recording area based on the BigBlueButton window. To capture the complete session information, you should turn on System Sound and Microphone.

3. When the BigBlueButton session starts, you can click on the REC button to record it. During the recording process, you can make some notes in real time, like adding text, lines, arrows, and specific labels.

4. When the recording is finished, you can click the end button to complete it and edit your recording file in the pop-up window. The file will be saved in your computer, and you can click the folder icon to open it. The captured BigBlueButton session will be saved in MP4 format by default. You can go to the Preferences window to select another output format according to your needs.

By using this software, you can easily record meeting for Zoom, Skype, Cisco, etc.

Conclusion

Now, you have learned the 2 efficient ways to record BigBlueButton sessions. The built-in recording feature of BigBlueButton is easy, and AnyMP4 Screen Recorder provides effective real-time editing features for you to note the important points in the sessions. You can choose your preferred method to save some valuable BigBlueButton sessions.