Dummy Plug

The aim of the dummy plug system is to make it trivial to record high-quality audio and video of metauni events. The system consists of OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) and Mac Automator scripts, which are intended to run either on a personal machine or a cloud instance. The initial version is running on a Mac and is used as follows.

Using Apple Remote Desktop you log into the dummy plug and

1. Run the keepalive script in Automator
2. Start recording in OBS Studio (or equivalent software, such as Camtasia)
3. Join the experience where the first recording is to take place

From there the scripts in Roblox take over. They contain a schedule of times, place IDs and orb names, that tell the scripts (in each of the worlds visited by the dummy plug) when to teleport the dummy plug to the experience for the next talk, and which orb to attach to as a listener when it gets there. The dummy plug will report its status regularly (and particularly around server changes) via the Discord bot into the #dummy-plug channel of Discord for remote monitoring.

Some remarks

• The initial version will not automatically start/stop the OBS recording, so for a long recording session you may want to log in midway through using Apple Remote Desktop and split the OBS video.
• It is possible that during the teleport the dummy plug ends up in a non-primary version of the server. This will be reported to the Discord channel. If the ServerUniq scripts are working correctly this should not be a problem.
• If the dummy plug leaves any experience outside of the schedule (e.g. it has an Internet connection problem) this will be reported to the Discord channel.
• The dummy plug may have a spatial voice problem, at the moment it is not clear that we can do anything about that.
• Recording is about 11Gb/hr.

WARNING: At the moment the dummy plug has many shortcomings, and it should be used as a backup only.

FAQ

• Where do the dummy plug accounts come from? Since they have to be spatial voice enabled, these accounts have to be age-verified. For the time being these will be accounts belonging to metauni administrators that are available for recording. Roblox's Terms of Use terms of use explicitly say "You may never allow anyone else to use your Account (except your parents or legal guardian)" so users can't provide "camera alt" account details to us to use on their behalf.

• Initial trial system: running on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instance with a T4 NVIDIA GPU (using the nvidia-gaming-windows-server-2019-1-vm image), and some Luau scripts running on the Roblox server.

Eventually

When the dummy plug (= the machine running OBS and the scripts) is activated it will automatically do the following:

1. Start Roblox and join the metauni Hub with a dedicated dummy plug account.
2. Waits for instructions (the dummy plug will attempt to stay in the Hub by sending keystrokes and rejoin if it is disconnected).

A user with dummy plug privileges, who is attached to an orb in a metauni experience as a speaker, can use a GUI element in the Orb system to "request a dummy plug". If one is available then

3. Server scripts in the Hub use TeleportService to send the dummy plug to the requested place.
4. The dummy plug attaches to the requested orb and enables listening mode and OrbCam.
5. The GCP instance begins to record audio (including spatial voice) and video using OBS.

The dummy plug will pause recording when the speaker detaches from the orb, and will resume recording when they reattach, until it is dismissed by the speaker at which point it will return to Step 2.

6. Completed videos are moved to an S3 bucket and a URL for download is either posted to a dedicated Discord channel or sent (via the Discord bot) to the Discord account of the speaker (who must have registered in Discord with their Roblox username).

Throughout this process somebody has to have their local machine connected via RDP to the GCP instance (but beyond keeping this connection alive they do not need to manually do anything). It may be technically more difficult to run this completely headless (see below).

Running OBS on a GCP machine with the NVIDIA T4 GPU and gaming image (note the bit about "enable the GPU whilst using RDP"). For streaming NVENC seems to be important.

Headless mode?

There may be some issues with capturing video on headless servers. See also OBS websocket.