OpenTok TokBox: Video in vertical presentation looks like in horizontal presentation after archiving

Question

Our aim is to show portait video (vertical orientation in terms of TokBox) without black areas right and leftside after archiving. Now it looks like landscape with black areas on right and left side. We are using php server and android client for streaming.

Our steps to convert live stream in video on demand through archieving are:

1. start session
2. update stream with the parameter layoutClassList = verticalPresentation (php library)
3. start archieving
4. live stream is on -> create subsriber and watch the stream. IMPORTANT! The stream has no black areas and has CORRECT presentation on subsriber side!
5. stop archieving
6. waiting TokBox upload archieving file to Amazon s3 bucket -> the file ALREADY contains black areas right-leftside. WRONG! (please watch the video on link for better understanding https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/edtv-dev1-input/46176492/9f26ef23-aee6-42f2-8c51-d8e2685abcc9/archive.mp4 )
   7. processing the file

Are thereabove the correct steps to achieve the goal - get video file without black areas (in portrait orientation)? Are we missing anything? Is archieving process on TokBox sensitive to horizontal/vertical presentation? is it possible to archive the video in vertical orientation?

UPDATE: What we wanted was not composed, but INDIVIDUAL stream! TokBox creates zip file, but Amazon AWS was able to transcode it and get the correct result both in portrait and landscape orientations.

NOTE: As a default result file on Amazon AWS after Individual stream archiving is *.zip (json + video file in it). The trascoder we used gave us video without sound. So we added lambda that unzipped the file. Now everything is ok, but took a lot of time and headache.

Answer 1

How can we get URL within the zip created by opentok which was uploaded in s3

Answer 2

Tokbox developer here

For composed archiving, the only two options currently available for output resolution are 640x480 and 1280x720. Trying to fit a portrait video into a canvas of the available resolutions will result in the video you are seeing.

Possible solutions:

• Use the custom layout control [1]: you can override the "object-fit" property to "cover". This may not result in exactly what you want, since the output resolution will still be 640x480 or 1280x720, but the video will occupy the whole canvas, at the expense of cropping the top and bottom part. See [2]

• The best solution in my opinion is to use "individual stream archiving", where the resolution will be kept as the original, and you get a file per stream. Please check [3]

  1. https://tokbox.com/developer/guides/archiving/layout-control.html
  2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/object-fit
  3. https://tokbox.com/developer/rest/#start_archive