Python Appium - Procedure for Video/Screen Recording

 Why Screen/Video recording is required?

When there are complex test scenarios and if there is any failure it becomes easy to identify where exactly is the failure. As a tester point of view, it is always necessary to provide logs, video recording and screenshots (This may vary project to project). 

So let us start how to accommodate video recording in your appium framework.

Basically you would need three steps here,

1. start video recording

2. stop video recording

3. convert the captured video to mp3or mp4 format

So to record video you would need

driver.start_recording_screen()

To Stop video you would need to call

driver.start_recording_screen()

So here I will explain you with calculator example,

from appium import webdriver
from login import Login
import time
import os
import base64


def __init__(self, driver):
    self.driver = driver

def test_calculator_click_number():
        desired_caps = {
                'platformName': 'android',
                'udid': 'emulator-5556',
                'deviceName': 'Pixel 2 API 28',
                'platformVersion': '9.0',
                'appPackage': 'com.android.calculator2',
                'appActivity': 'com.android.calculator2.Calculator'                
            }
        driver = webdriver.Remote("http://localhost:4723/wd/hub", desired_caps)
        driver.start_recording_screen()
        login = Login(driver)
        login.login_in_to_app()
        video_rawdata = driver.stop_recording_screen()
        video_name = driver.current_activity + time.strftime("%Y_%m_%d_%H%M%S")
        filepath = os.path.join("C:/Data/2021/May/Sample/", video_name+".mp4")


        with open(filepath,"wb+") as vd:
             vd.write(base64.b64decode(video_rawdata))

Here whatever video has been recorded is stored in video_rawdata variable. Later at this point

with open(filepath,"wb+") as vd:
     vd.write(base64.b64decode(video_rawdata))

It is been converted. In below code, video_name is the variable with current activity name and current time of video recording

video_name = driver.current_activity + time.strftime("%Y_%m_%d_%H%M%S")

In below code snippet we have stored the video at specified location

filepath = os.path.join("C:/Data/2021/May/Sample/", video_name+".mp4")