Feature Request: Appium with video capabilities

[gerelasumit]

Hi Alasdair,
I have been using you selenium video plugin for browser testing and it works completely fine. However, I would like to know if the same can be used for testing mobile apps with appium? I will have similar setup for for mobile testing as well i.e. bunch of appium nodes would connect to the selenium hub. these appium nodes will have android emulators running for testing.
If so, can you please suggest how? how should the nodes be modified?

[suayipozmen]

@gerelasumit
My grid supports video recording on appium and selenium nodes. I have used this project to record on selenium nodes.
Appium does not support video recording. We use android shell command "adb shell screenrecord" for real device recording. But this command does not work in emulators. So you should record emulator window by using this project. Also this command can only record maximum 180 seconds. 180 second is a hardcoded limit in android kernel. So you should start a new process if your test is longer than 180 seconds. After the test finished you should concatenate video files.
We also record iphone real device with appium but ios one is more complicated. We have developed a mac app to record video from real devices. I remember ios simulator supports video recording.

[aimmac23]

Hi gerelasumit,

To support a new platform we would need:

• An API method to call somewhere which can grab the current screen view (either in Java, or something which can somehow be called in Java, like C/C++ methods).
• A video encoder library which we can feed the screen images, to produce the video.

At the moment the Windows/Linux/Mac support for this project gets screen images from Java AWT Robot class (which eventually calls some native code to talk to the relevant part of the OS in question), and feeds the images into the VP8 video encoder (compiled for the specific platform).

So to support Appium in the same way we would need to determine how to grab the current screen data.. and make sure we have the right libraries in-place to produce the video.

At the moment I know almost nothing about mobile development (sorry), but it sounds like @suayipozmen has a few pointers about where to look - it may be the case that asking the phone OS to take a video would be the most efficient method...

I'll take a look at some mobile APIs - there might be something usable in there.

Thanks,

Alasdair

[gerelasumit]

Thanks everyone for your comments. I'll also look into it and share if I find anything valuable.