Question

If I manually or automatically initiate archiving, is there any cost to this?

Applies To

• Manual Archiving
• Automatic Archiving
• Billing

Answer

Creating archives requires the use of our composing services. To make high-quality archives in a format you can use immediately (MP4), we start allocating composer resources when you initiate archiving. Until you've completed your recording, the composer services are dedicated to creating your archive. Thus, if you pause recording, the composer service is locked and cannot be used. In short, we incur the cost of composing. Therefore, there are charges to reflect this cost.

This cost is relevant for users who either manually initiate archiving but don't have media flowing immediately after or automatically archive sessions which reserves composer resources as soon as a client connects to the session and stops 60sec after the last client disconnects from the session, even if media is not flowing immediately.

To specify whether a session automatically starts archiving or manually initiated, use the 'archiveMode' parameter when creating a session. In cases where archiving needs to be manually initiated, here is an example of how you use the REST API to manually initiate archiving: 

https://api.opentok.com/v2/project/<api_key>/archive (with the sessionId in the POST data)

You can view your Insights Dashboard for archiving usage to verify that your usage of the service aligns with your expectation.

Reference Links

Insights API Dashboard documentation

ArchiveMode documentation