[Feature request] record a video of a live device session

[hassineabd]

Problem

The hub can stream and screenshot a device's screen, but there's no way to capture a video of what happened during a session (e.g. to attach to a bug report, or keep as evidence for a manual test run). Right now the only workaround is screen-recording the browser tab locally.

Proposed feature

• A "Record" button in the live device view that starts/stops recording the device's screen stream (server-side, not a local browser capture) and produces a downloadable video file (mp4/webm) at the end.
• Reuse the existing per-platform stream pipeline:
• Android: MJPEG stream already available → encode frames server-side, or shell out to adb shell screenrecord on the provider and pull the file.
• iOS: the ffmpeg pipeline already used for the experimental WebRTC stream → tee that into a video file.
• Store recordings alongside where screenshots currently go (or a dedicated /recordings path), with a download link in the hub UI.

Implementation questions to discuss

• Encoding on the provider (closer to the device/stream) or on the hub (after the stream is proxied)? Provider seems right given the existing per-platform pipelines — wanted to confirm.
• Retention/cleanup policy — auto-delete recordings after N days?
• Size/duration cap to protect providers from runaway recordings?

I can pick this up — happy to open a PR once we've settled on the feature design and requirements

[shamanec]

I doubt server-side is going to be a simple implementation - we have multiple supported video streams for Android and iOS which with their own caveats, also using ffmpeg or similar tools to create them will require different approaches depending on which OS the provider runs on which increases complexity even further. Whats the problem with doing recordings via local browser capture? We can still add a button to "store" the video if needed for later but that will require even more work - GADS currently does not use any appropriate storage, app files are stored in Mongo since they are not very big, but videos would require plain storage alongside the hub instance, S3 integration or something else. So essentially just browser capture with a download and no storage is the most appropriate implementation for such a feature, but even this way it might require some work because the mjpeg and videos are not some perfect pipeline - frames might be coming or not depending on whats happening on the screen, quality might change based on the consumer bandwidth and other things which might make videos a bit weird in pacing (I am assuming :D)

[shamanec]

I did a quick test for browser-based recording with my good friend Opus and it seems feasible, if you are okay with recording via browser on an up to 10 minutes limit(to save memory) and being able to have only one video at a time that you can download before starting recording another, then this is something I can implement for next release :)

[hassineabd]

I thought more about using appium commands for this purpose - Didn't went deeper on this option yet

[shamanec]

Done here, pending for the next major release v6. Recording is allowed for up to 10 minutes using the browser MediaRecorder API, video is only stored for the current remote control session and can be downloaded at that time, you can initiate a new recording and discard the previous one. I will update this issue when it is released :)

[shamanec]

Released in v6.0.0