meet/UPGRADE.md

Upgrade

All instructions to upgrade this project from one release to the next will be documented in this file. Upgrades must be run sequentially, meaning you should not skip minor/major releases while upgrading (fix releases can be skipped).

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

For most upgrades, you just need to run the django migrations with the following command inside your docker container:

python manage.py migrate

(Note : in your development environment, you can make migrate.)

[Unreleased]

Recording encoding settings replaced by a resolution/profile model

The RECORDING_ENCODING_* settings introduced in v1.16.0 exposed raw encoder values (width, height, framerate, bitrate). They are replaced by two named and configurable sets of dimensions, a resolution (default: 540p, 720p, 1080p) and a profile (default: talking_heads, text, mixed, full), which are resolved to the width, height, fps and video bitrate.

The following environment variables are no longer read. If they are still set in your deployment they are silently ignored, and your recordings will be encoded with the new defaults instead of your tuned values.

Removed variable	Replaced by
RECORDING_ENCODING_ENABLED	Nothing. A default encoding is now always built (see below). Not RECORDING_CUSTOM_ENCODING_ENABLED, which gates a different feature.
RECORDING_ENCODING_WIDTH	The width of the entry selected by RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_RESOLUTION in RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_RESOLUTIONS.
RECORDING_ENCODING_HEIGHT	The height of that same entry.
RECORDING_ENCODING_FRAMERATE	The fps of the profile selected by RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE in RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_PROFILES.
RECORDING_ENCODING_VIDEO_BITRATE_KBPS	That profile's kbps.

RECORDING_ENCODING_AUDIO_BITRATE_KBPS and RECORDING_ENCODING_KEY_FRAME_INTERVAL_S keep their names and meaning. The keyframe interval now defaults to 0 (unset, encoder's choice) instead of 4.0.

If you never set RECORDING_ENCODING_ENABLED=True

The shipped defaults (RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE=full, RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_RESOLUTION=720p) match LiveKit's built-in H264_720P_30 preset: 1280×720, 30 fps, 3000 kbps H.264 MAIN, 128 kbps AAC. Video output is therefore unchanged.

Audio and keyframing may not be. These values are now sent explicitly as advanced EncodingOptions rather than relying on LiveKit's preset, so RECORDING_ENCODING_AUDIO_BITRATE_KBPS and RECORDING_ENCODING_KEY_FRAME_INTERVAL_S now apply to every recording. They previously applied only when RECORDING_ENCODING_ENABLED was True. If you set either of them while the feature was disabled, they had no effect and now do; check them before upgrading.

If you never set them, no action is required: 128 kbps AAC is what the preset used, and the keyframe interval now defaults to 0, which leaves the field unset so the encoder keeps picking it as before. Set RECORDING_ENCODING_KEY_FRAME_INTERVAL_S=4.0 if you want fixed 4-second keyframes (the value the setting defaulted to while it was gated behind RECORDING_ENCODING_ENABLED).

To keep letting LiveKit pick the encoding instead, set either default to an empty value:

RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_RESOLUTION=
RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE=

If you had tuned RECORDING_ENCODING_* values

Translate your old values into a default resolution and a default profile. Declare your own resolution and/or profile. Both maps are read from the environment as a single-line Python/JSON dict literal (parsed with ast.literal_eval, so use double-quoted keys and no trailing commas, and do not add outer quotes in .env-style files):

RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_RESOLUTIONS={"540p": {"width": 960, "height": 540}, "720p": {"width": 1280, "height": 720}, "1080p": {"width": 1920, "height": 1080}}
RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_PROFILES={"my_old_profile": {"fps": 15, "kbps": {"540p": 350, "720p": 600, "1080p": 1100}}}
RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_RESOLUTION=720p
RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE=my_old_profile

Both maps are validated at startup and a malformed one raises a ValueError:

• every entry of RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_RESOLUTIONS must declare width and height, and every entry of RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_PROFILES an fps and a kbps map;
• every profile must define a kbps entry for exactly the keys of RECORDING_ENCODING_AVAILABLE_RESOLUTIONS; overriding one of the two maps usually means overriding both;
• RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_RESOLUTION and RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE, when non-empty, must be keys of their respective map.

Breaking: custom worker services must accept encoding_options

Only concerns deployments pointing RECORDING_WORKER_CLASSES at their own worker class. The shipped VideoCompositeEgressService and AudioCompositeEgressService are already updated.

The WorkerService protocol's start() takes a third argument, and the mediator now always passes it as a keyword when the recording carries no per-recording encoding:

# before
def start(self, room_id: str, recording_id: str) -> str: ...

# now
def start(
    self,
    room_id: str,
    recording_id: str,
    encoding_options: Optional[Dict[str, Any]] = None,
) -> str: ...

Optional: per-recording encoding

RECORDING_CUSTOM_ENCODING_ENABLED (default False) toggles whether the start-recording API accepts an encoding object ({"resolution": "720p", "profile": "talking_heads"}, profile optional. It falls back to RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_PROFILE) that overrides the default for a single recording. It does not enable or disable the default encoding, which is built from the two RECORDING_ENCODING_DEFAULT_* settings either way. Leaving it at False preserves the previous behaviour, where every recording uses the server-side encoding: requests carrying options.encoding are rejected with a 400 before the recording is created, so nothing is persisted and no egress is started.

Before enabling it:

• clients can only pick keys you declared; there is no way to send a raw width or bitrate
• as of this implementation, the frontend never sends encoding
• encoding is accepted but ignored for transcript recordings, whose audio-only egress has no video encoding to configure.

See docs/features/recording.md for the full setting reference, the shipped profile table and the tuning caveats.

v1.30.0

Removing S3 storage-event webhooks for recordings

Recordings were previously confirmed as saved by an S3 storage-event webhook posting to /api/v1.0/recordings/storage-hook/. That endpoint has been removed: recordings are now always finalized from LiveKit's own egress_ended webhook, which has been the default path since v1.22.0.

Required for every deployment: LiveKit must be able to deliver webhooks to the backend at /api/v1.0/rooms/webhooks-livekit/. This is now the only way a recording reaches a saved state; if egress_ended is never delivered, recordings stay in the active state.

For hosters who had configured storage-event webhooks:

• Recordings reach the same final state, but they are now finalized when LiveKit reports the egress as ended rather than when the storage backend reports the upload.
• Remove the event notification from your bucket configuration: it now targets a non-existent endpoint and will fail on every delivery.

For hosters who had not configured storage-event webhooks:

• Nothing changes. Recordings have been finalized from the egress_ended webhook since v1.22.0.

In both cases, the following settings are no longer used and can be removed from your env: RECORDING_EVENT_PARSER_CLASS, RECORDING_ENABLE_STORAGE_EVENT_AUTH, RECORDING_STORAGE_EVENT_ENABLE, RECORDING_STORAGE_EVENT_TOKEN.

On completion of the egress, a recording moves to notification_succeeded, or to saved if notifying external services failed.

v1.23.0

As part of the 1.23.0 release, the legacy api/v1 implementation has been removed from the experimental Summary service and Meet has been migrated to the new api/v2.

To avoid a breaking change, the Meet backend continues to use the Summary service's v1-compatible API format by default (SUMMARY_SERVICE_VERSION setting defaults to 1).

If you are deploying both Meet and Summary from this repository, you must configure the Meet backend to use the v2 API by setting the following environment variable SUMMARY_SERVICE_VERSION=2.

If you are upgrading only the Meet deployment while keeping an older Summary v1 compatible deployment, no action is required, as the v1-compatible API remains the default.

Note that we plan on removing the legacy v1 summary compatibility in a future major version. If you have your own implementation for the summary service, we recommend updating its API contract and setting SUMMARY_SERVICE_VERSION=2.