Objective

Obtaining HD or FullHD (FHD) resolution recordings and live streaming with Vonage Video API sessions.

Applies To

• Video API
• HD Resolution
• FHD Resolution
• Recordings
• Live Streaming

Procedure

Vonage Video API supports HD and FHD composed recording as well as HD and FHD  live streaming for broadcast. HD resolution provides a high quality experience that is 3X as large of a composition canvass as SD video.  FHD resolution provides a high quality experience that is more than 2.5X as large as HD. This article explains key features related to HD/FHD recording and streaming.

FHD and HD Composed Recording

HD and FHD recording is available for the composed archive recording format. By default, composed archive recording uses a 640x480-pixel (SD) resolution. 

To get 1280x720 (HD) resolution, set the resolution property to 1280x720 (landscape) or 720x1280 (portrait) when calling the start archive recording method of the Vonage Video REST API.  

To get 1920x1080 (FHD) resolution, set the resolution property to 1920x1080 (landscape) or 1080x1920 (portrait) when calling the start archive recording method of the Vonage Video REST API. Multiple video publishers (or screenshare) are composed on a Full HD canvas stored in a recording.

Note:

1. Resolution selection is not available on automatically archived sessions.
2. The individual recording feature creates separate media files for each participant, retaining the resolution of the original published stream. So, if the original published stream is HD it will be recorded as such.
3. You can also set the resolution property when starting an archive recording in latest release of OpenTok Node Server SDK, OpenTok PHP Server SDK.

FHD and HD Live Streaming Broadcast

Vonage Video sessions support live streaming broadcasting HD and FHD quality for HLS and RTMP streaming. To broadcast videos in HD, set the resolution property to 1280x720 (landscape) or 720x1280 (portrait) when calling start broadcast method of the Vonage Video REST API.  

To broadcast videos in FHD, set the resolution property to 1920x1080 (landscape) or 1080x1920 (portrait) when calling start broadcast method of the Vonage Video REST API. Multiple video publishers (or screenshares) are composed on the Full HD canvas for live streaming broadcast over RTMP or HLS.

Note: WebRTC-based real-time sessions (One-to-one, Multi-party or Broadcast) support HD (720p) and FHD (1080p) as long as the endpoint has enough resources (bandwidth & CPU) to support HD or FHD streaming.

Layouts

Vonage supports all the same video layouts for archives and live streaming broadcasts for Full HD compositions as for HD and SD composed archive recordings and live streaming broadcasts.  This means that video layouts can be predefined or custom and also support dynamically changing the layout type during an archive recording or during a live streaming broadcast.  It should be noted that for Full HD compositions, the number of possible video regions displayed in the layout is increased since there is more canvas to display the video streams with a Full HD composition.

Custom Layouts

If you use custom layouts for archive recording or broadcast, keep in mind the HD and FHD aspect ratios when defining CSS stylesheets as HD and FHD videos will have a 16:9 aspect ratio compared to SD videos that use 4:3. The aspect ratio is taken care of in case of predefined layout types.  Also note that the composition canvas size is much larger for FHD vs HD or SD, which may require layout planning.