Recover videos from participants other than the active speaker from local recording

Tricky issue I’m hoping for help with. Have a local recording where the resulting ‘double_click_to_convert_01.zoom’ file is 355MB, but the resulting ‘zoom_0.mp4’ file is only 11.6MB as the recording layout was set to active speaker, but the wrong participant had been used in conversion. Here’s what I believe has happened, and after that, where I’m wondering if the SDK/API could help…

Started the call with two active participants. Me talking but with my video off. The other participant with both video and audio enabled. We switched to using an alternate method for recording audio about 25 seconds in and once set up, had muted zoom audio. His video had him displayed as the active speaker and remained so for the rest of the call, so I had believed the recording would have maintained this as well. However, it seems he muted his zoom audio before I muted mine. So when the recording converted after the call, it assigned me as the active speaker for the remainder of the call instead.

Have searched all the support pages and the forum here with no luck. Tried the suggestion of using the original files to overwrite the files of an in progress call for a new conversion, as detailed here. Even tried starting a new call with a second person to see if assigning them as the active speaker would help in using that solution. That just gave me a black screen for the video instead. Have reached out to Zoom support and still awaiting a response. As there is an urgent need to figure out if that video is recoverable or not, thought I’d reach out here too and ask a few more questions…

I guess generally speaking to start, any ideas on how I can recover the video of the other speaker? I had been wondering if there was a way to alter the metadata of the .zoom files to change who is assigned as the active speaker before converting the file again? Is there a way to process the conversion using the SDK/API in a way that would allow me to do that? Anywhere to direct me that could help to understand how that file is structured? I’m curious if trying the trick mentioned above again may work out differently if I were to have the same participants back on a new call, but not sure if participant IDs would be maintained between meetings.

Appreciate any help, thanks!

Device info:

  • 2017 iMac
  • MacOS 10.14.6
  • Zoom 5.0.3

Hi @invivo,

Thanks for the post and thanks for the detailed info. It seems like you are facing issues with our Zoom client, which is out of the scope of what this forum is for(This forum is for Marketplace Apps). Unfortunately, what you are mentioning cannot be controlled and done by SDK or API. Please try to contact Zoom client support at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/requests/new and one of the Zoom experts will be happy to assist you. I really would like to help but I don’t have any visibilities regarding the issues with Zoom client.

Thanks!