Writing an recording provider plugin

A Recording Provider is a way to provide iframes of videos that will be displayed on the public talk pages of a talk.

In this document, we will walk through the creation of a plugin for a new recording provider step by step. If you’d like to look at a completed working recording provider, take a look at our plugin for Vimeo (manual embedding) or our plugin for media.ccc.de (using an API).

Please read Creating a plugin first, if you haven’t already.

Recording Provider registration

The recording provider API uses only one signal to collect a list of all available providers. Your plugin should listen for this signal and return a subclass of pretalx.agenda.recording.BaseRecordingProvider:

from django.dispatch import receiver

from pretalx.agenda.signals import register_recording_provider


@receiver(register_recording_provider)
def vimeo_provider(sender, **kwargs):
   from .recording import VimeoProvider
    return VimeoProvider(sender)

The recording provider class

class pretalx.agenda.recording.BaseRecordingProvider

The central object of each recording provider is the subclass of BaseRecordingProvider.

BaseRecordingProvider.event

BaseRecordingProvider.get_recording(submission)

Returns a dictionary {“iframe”: …, “csp_header”: …} Both the iframe and the csp_header should be strings.

This is an abstract method, you must override this! The method receives the submission and should return a dictionary containing an “iframe” and a “csp_header”, if a recording iframe should be shown.

Hints and considerations

There are a couple of things you might want to consider while working on your recording provider:

Using the periodic_task plugin signal is helpful if you want to find new recordings automatically – but take care not to do this overly much. Looking for new recordings once an hour while the event is running and in the week afterwards should be sufficient.

If you’re able to gather recording URLs automatically, your users will still want an interface to see and potentially edit said recording URLs.

If you wrap your iframe in a <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9">, it should look good on the session page. Remember to set allowfullscreen on the iframe!