StreamYard offers local recording! Sometimes, unexpected internet issues can interrupt a perfect recording and cause quality drops or complete freezes. With local recordings, you can download the perfect quality recording of each individual video and audio track, to edit together.
👉🏻 Introducing Local Recording
Local recordings are studio-quality, individual audio and video recordings of each host and guest recorded directly on the device. This method ensures that you create high-quality, freeze-free recordings regardless of your internet connection, significantly improving the quality for your post-production editing.
The local recording feature allows you to download an individual audio file and an individual video file (with audio) for each participant in the live stream or recording. You can also download the separate tracks for each screen share, slide, and video shared during the recording. Individual locally recorded video files will include audio when they are downloaded to your device.
📌 Please Note:
- Local recordings capture a clean feed from all participants' audio and video, so Brand assets (overlays, backgrounds, etc...) will not affect or appear in recordings.
- Each individual recording - including additional cameras angle - will contain the video and audio in separate files for that specific participant. Separate video and audio tracks are truly separate -- they do not include other guests' audio or videos.
- The individual audio recording for each participant in the stream will be downloadable as WAV files. WAV files are generally lossless and not compressed, meaning they will be higher quality for video and audio editing than an MP3 file! When you download the combined audio recording for the stream, this will be an MP3 file.
You cannot download the local mixed version of your whole stream, but this feature is coming in the future. You can only download the cloud-mixed version. The mixed version means the entire stream or recording -- including all participants, all the banners/logos/backgrounds etc.
Please note that the multiple files produced by Local recordings do not affect your total recording hours. For example, if you record a one-hour podcast with yourself and one other guest, two full files are created, but the recording will only count as one hour toward your recording limit.
👉🏻 How to Enable Local Recordings
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Enter the studio and click Settings.
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Click on the Recording tab.
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Check the box to Record locally for each participant
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Then select either Record audio and video or Record audio only.
👉🏻 How to complete the Local Recordings
Once you enable Local Recordings, StreamYard will record a separate video and audio file of each participant during the recording, in the browser's local storage. This means that the quality of the recordings is not dependent on your internet connection.
After you enable Local Recordings, when your guests join your studio they will see this message:
Once all your guests have joined, you can click the Record or Go Live button. You will see a popup window confirming your selected settings for your Local Recordings if you've enabled it. You can click the pencil icon to edit your settings, or click the Record/Go Live button again to begin your recording/stream.
Once you've finished your recording, all participants should remain in the studio until their recordings are finished uploading. The upload status of each participant's recording can be seen by viewing the Recording tab on the right-hand side of the studio.
Once all recordings have finished uploading, you will see this confirmation here:
You can click "View Recordings" to take you to the recordings dashboard, where you will be able to download both your local, and cloud recordings. You can also click the Export button to export your recordings as project files for easy editing!
👉🏻 Best Practices and Recommendations
While local recordings are designed to minimize the impact of connectivity issues experienced during a stream, the local recording feature still relies on an internet connection in order to function. If connectivity issues persist for too long during a broadcast your device may run out of space to store new segments or uploads may be corrupted/incomplete due to an unstable internet connection.
⚠️ If these issues occur, we won't be able to recover any lost segments.
Below are key recommendations to ensure a seamless experience:
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Internet Connection Requirements
As always we recommend ensuring you have a strong internet connection when streaming and recording on StreamYard.
👉🏻 If the participant’s internet connection is fast enough (4mbps or higher), the local recordings will be uploaded during the recording or live stream. In this case, the files would be available immediately after the stream.
👉🏻 If StreamYard detects that a guest or host is struggling to upload their local recording segments while the local recording feature is enabled and the broadcast is streaming, it will temporarily pause the local recording uploads and prioritize their bandwidth for the stream. Once the stream has ended or their connection has improved during the stream, StreamYard will resume uploading the segments of their local recordings.
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Storage Space & Browser Limitations
The amount of storage space required on the device being used will depend on the length of the recording. We recommend participants have 5GB of storage available on their device before recording. This should be sufficient for most people. The recording is often uploaded at the same time as well.
A browser only allows websites to utilize a percentage of the available storage space on the hard drive, and this can vary between browsers: i.e., Chrome only lets us use around 60% of the available hard drive space, and Firefox allows 50%.
📍 We recommend NOT using a "private window" (incognito) as it limits the storage that your browser can access and it won't save the file if you close the window before the upload finishes, as private windows don't hold temporary data once closed.
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Browser Settings
We recommend ensuring that the web browser being used is up to date. Using an out-of-date browser may affect your recordings.
- Please double-check your Chrome settings to make sure "Allow sites to save data on your device" is enabled.
- For Firefox, you'll want to make sure that the setting "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" is not enabled. Learn more about that setting here.
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Audio & Video Settings
The same recommendations apply to local recordings and regular streaming. These are:
- 1080p HD, 4500kbps video bitrate
- 720p HD, 3000kbps video bitrate
- The audio bitrate is 128kbps.
👉🏻 Having Issues?
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My local recording upload is not working.
When you have multiple StreamYard tabs open only one of them will win the election to upload. Please try closing fully out of all other open StreamYard tabs, and going to streamyard.com/upload on the same device/browser used for the live stream!
Check our dedicated article for more instructions if your upload is stuck.
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My guest accidentally left before the upload was complete.
If your guests accidentally leave before the upload is complete, they can return to streamyard.com/upload up to 30 days after the date of the recording to finish uploading.
⚠️ If they connected using a private window (incognito), it won't be possible to recover the data as private windows don't hold temporary data once closed.
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My guest's audio has been recorded in multiple files in the Cloud, but not locally.
When you add and remove a guest from the stage in your studio, StreamYard will create a separate audio file in the cloud for each time they are added. When you download the audio recordings from the "Cloud Recordings" tab, you will receive a zip folder that contains these individual files. The local video/audio recording for this guest will only be one file (with a blank space in the middle during the portions this guest was not added to the stream). However, if this guest fully leaves the studio and reenters, a separate video/audio recording will be created for them upon reentering.
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