Add video recording commands (start-video, stop-video)#4
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Records video of Chrome sessions by capturing CDP screencast frames during each rodney command execution. No background process needed - frames are captured automatically while commands run and accumulated across invocations. - start-video: enables recording flag in state, creates frames dir - stop-video: assembles frames into MP4 via ffmpeg (with graceful fallback), cleans up frames dir - Screencast capture hooks into withPage() and cmdOpen() transparently - Variable framerate video assembly using frame timestamps - 9 new tests covering start/stop/capture/accumulation/assembly https://claude.ai/code/session_018GfJUXfG9azF393kRTQPss
GIF is now the default output format for stop-video (no ffmpeg needed). Uses Go stdlib image/gif with Plan9 palette and Floyd-Steinberg dithering. Frame deduplication: consecutive identical frames (after quantization to 256 colors) are merged into a single GIF frame with extended duration. This significantly reduces file size for sessions with static page moments between commands. Format is auto-detected from file extension: - .gif: pure Go encoding with deduplication (default) - .mp4: ffmpeg assembly with variable framerate (requires ffmpeg) 4 new tests covering GIF encoding, dedup verification, stdlib decode validation, and extension-based format detection. https://claude.ai/code/session_018GfJUXfG9azF393kRTQPss
When stop-video is called with a .mp4 extension but ffmpeg isn't installed, automatically fall back to producing a .gif instead of silently failing. Prints a message to stderr informing the user. https://claude.ai/code/session_018GfJUXfG9azF393kRTQPss
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I tried this: go build .
./rodney start
./rodney start-video
./rodney open https://datasette.io/
./rodney click a
./rodney sleep 3
./rodney stop-video out.gifAnd got this:
The |
cmdSleep now connects to the active page when video recording is on, so screencast frames are captured during the sleep period. Also adds a LoopCount assertion to the GIF stdlib decode test. https://claude.ai/code/session_018GfJUXfG9azF393kRTQPss
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I thought it wasn't looping but turns out it had a 25s hold on the last frame: |
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Looks like the 25s delay is because the tool was using the timestamps of when commands were run to modify GIF lengths. I said:
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alex-pezarro-portswigger
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Apr 20, 2026
Resolve conflicts by: - Combining State struct so Logs/LoggerPID/Label (existing) coexist with VideoRecording/VideoDir (new) - Keeping RODNEY_HOME + activeStateDir (--local/--global) lookup while adding stateDirOverride for test isolation used by pr-4 tests - Restoring missing closing braces on TestLogs_FormatLogLevel and TestLogs_WriteJSONLine that git's merge algorithm elided because similar section delimiters appeared on both sides - Merging imports and keeping both sides' video tests plus the existing cookie/logs/label tests Also includes the per-frame-duration cap fix from the review feedback: idle time between rodney command invocations no longer leaks into the GIF/MP4 output as a long hold on the last frame.
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Records video of Chrome sessions by capturing CDP screencast frames
during each rodney command execution. No background process needed -
frames are captured automatically while commands run and accumulated
across invocations.
fallback), cleans up frames dir
https://claude.ai/code/session_018GfJUXfG9azF393kRTQPss