How do I view the size of each video file and how much of the 500 GB I have remaining?

Copper Contributor

Hi,

 

I will be using Streams to access videos recorded during live Teams meetings video calls.  I can't seem to find the size of the files.  The account only has 500 GB, as is standard for paying users, so I want to know how big each video file is, and how much space I have remaining.  Where can I see that?  The video files record directly to Stream, they don't end up on my hard drive. Streams is the only place that has the videos.

5 Replies

@BrianHallRHMI want to share this blog post from Tony Redmond: https://office365itpros.com/2020/03/30/stream-storage-consumption-driven-teams-meetings-recordings/

He has done some analysis by downloading meeting recordings from Stream with a result of about 8MB per Minute for a Teams meeting recording. With 500GB you can store a little bit more than 1000 hours. In the Stream portal you can not see the size. 

What you should know also is, that only the video size of the original video counts against this limit, not the other 5 to 6 video resolutions.

@Tomislav Karafilov thanks very much!  I shared that blog post with our person who has the Office 365 Admin account here, so they can check the streams drive space usage over time.

 

If I was on the software dev team for Streams (and I have been writing software for 20+ years) I definitely would have made video file size and "[drive space] used out of [drive space] available" displayed for every video and every user who can upload videos, or record video to Streams through Teams.

 

I was writing Perl scripts to pick metadata like file sizes out of video and image files a decade ago!  Someone forgot the old principle "if the user's account has limitations, let them know through the interface" 

 

So please make this a feature request for Streams for more than just the administrators. At a minimum, show the file size of each video in the "My Videos" page, with total drive space available for the Office 365 subscription at the bottom.

The storage per user is woefully low for workforces which are reliant on Teams meetings. A recording of a one hour meeting will consume approx 400MB of storage. That basically means once a user has recorded just one meeting they have used their allocation of the pool! (500MB). Whilst it is true that not all users will be recording meetings you would soon find that if you recorded regular team meetings, training etc you would burn that storage in no time.

@alexpooley  You have 500GB per tenant and 0,5GB per user, all added together and than the space is shared with all users. So a user has not "only" 500MB for himself, a user can use from the summed storage. See the limits here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/quotas-and-limitations#user-limits

 

And everyone starting a recording of a Teams meeting has to take care about the video. Because Stream has no retention policy, you as company or school have to give them rules. For example: delete a meeting recording after one week or one month. If informations should be extracted, trim the video and give more people permissions or write down your protocol and store it in SharePoint as reference. Recording every meeting and you do not touch the recordings afterwards is not good. Stream is good for videos that are used from the people, not OneDrive for videos with unlimited storage. And if the space in Stream is not enough, you can buy 500GB chunks to extend the space (not cheap!).

Yes, I know it is pooled, but just as an example if all users recorded one hour it would be full, in the same way it would be if half of your users recorded two hours. User guidance is fine, but unlikely to be followed and due to the lack of analytics you can't easily pull up users who are consuming the most storage. I'm sure analytics improvements and an API will land, at least allowing some automation of removal of old content, but for now it is going to be very hands on.