Video recorded is incomplete - last frames before tests are complete are not recorded

[PinkyJie]

Current behavior:

When running with cypress run --record, the generated mp4 video file is incomplete, it does not wait for testing to be finished.

Desired behavior:

The generated video file should be able to record the whole testing process.

Steps to reproduce:

Check an example here in Cypress Dashboard: (it's a public project so I assume you can all access this)

https://dashboard.cypress.io/#/projects/nf8wkk/runs

There are 2 runs, one is recored from Mac, another one is from Linux on Travis CI, the generated videos files from both of them are incomplete.

Here is my project for reference https://github.com/PinkyJie/cypress-auto-stub-example

Versions

Cypress: 3.1.0
System: Mac 10.12
Browser: Chrome 68

[brian-mann]

This isn't a bug - we're really talking about maybe just a couple frames here. It is in fact recording everything, but the test runner UI uses react, which renders asynchronously (and the browser itself paints asynchronously) and therefore there's no guarantee that those frames are ever actually rendered before the browser itself shuts down.

The test itself has already passed and therefore the browser is killed. Closing as not a bug.

For this to "show" up we would have to artificially extend the run by a couple seconds which seems unnecessary considering there isn't really any useful information in the last couple frames. Had you run more tests the video would have covered all of them.

[Yaowenjie]

I have similar issue, but it only happens in Linux, not for Mac.

Actually it is not only incomplete, but also intermittent. You can see the video runs fine in first 3 to 5 seconds, then the video stay there for about 10 seconds, in the end of the video you might see one second view of moment of next steps. Videos becomes useless if they are always like this. But it works very well in Mac. Does anyone has same issue?

By the way, we use chrome67-ff57 docker images with cypress installed to run it, is it also related to this issue?

[danverde]

I'm having a similar issue as well but on Mac.
My spec file has 11 tests all with multiple assertions (they're not small tests). All my tests pass, but the video ends halfway through the 9th test. If not having enough tests in a spec file can cause this issue then how many tests are required before this is no longer an issue?

[jennifer-shehane]

I've seen this issue crop up more recently. It does not generally look to be a couple of frames, but swaths of the video freeze during the video.

[platan]

In our case is just a matter of last frames. Currently we have only one test. We are using cypress 3.2.0 + docker cypress/base:8. An example incomplete video: https://47779-7910045-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/root/project/cypress/videos/main-page.spec.js.mp4 (artifact from https://circleci.com/gh/badges/shields/47779#artifacts/containers/0). At the end this should be shown:

As @brian-mann said, this not a big problem when test is passing. But it would be valuable to have full video then test is failing (I don't know if video is incomplete in this case).

[szokrika]

With version 3.2.0:
Same here, I can confirm that a few frames are missing from the end of the generated video...

[szokrika]

I've kind of 'made it work' by adding a wait(1000) to the end of the test...

[austinfox]

I can confirm that I am seeing large amounts of my recordings "frozen". The first few seconds of the video are fine and then the the video hangs for the rest of the test. Sometimes the video resumes for a short period later on in the tests, but only for a short while until it freezes again. This seems to be transient for me, not happening to any particular test all the time. This has been an issue ever since upgrading to 3.2.0

[pisti2010]

I also join and confirm this is an issue for us. The video starts fine for about 5sec, then it gets "stuck" or "frozen" and stays like that for the whole duration of the test, usually between 40sec to 1min30sec.
The issue seems to be completely random. It does not happen all the time, it does not happen to the same test files.
We run out tests on GitlabCi. If I can offer any information to help diagnose this please let me know.

[maryhipp]

We are also seeing this issue with recordings on our Cypress Dashboard using cypress v3.2.0. It doesn't happen on every video, but it does happen often (maybe 7 times out of 10). It will freeze around the 1 minute mark and sometimes recovers, sometimes doesn't, in which case we essentially lose the entire recording. I have tried with and without video compression and doesn't seem to impact.

Our tests run on Jenkins. Happy to offer more info if I can!

[platan]

We have the same issue in https://github.com/badges/shields. Example videos https://52855-7910045-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/root/project/cypress/videos/main-page.spec.js.mp4, https://53812-7910045-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/root/project/cypress/videos/main-page.spec.js.mp4. But I think that these "frozen" videos are a separate problem. Original problem described in this issue is about incomplete videos.

[jennifer-shehane]

@platan I agree, the issue with the Test Runner rendering 'freezing' during video record is a different issue than a video ending prematurely - so that the last frames of the test running are not present at all in the video.

@pisti2010 @maryhipp Can you open a separate issue about 'freezing' videos?

[jennifer-shehane]

❗️ I opened a new issue for when the UI appears to 'freeze' or be frozen during the video recording here: #4722

❓ If you're having the issue where the video recording clearly finishes without the last frames of the test run being recorded at all - please comment in this issue, ideally with all of your environment information:

• Cypress version? - PLEASE update to latest version and see if this still happens
• Operating System?
• CI?

[WillsB3]

I'm also having this issue. The recording is missing at least 2-3 seconds (maybe more) from the end. (e.g. the video ends before the last test is even in progress).

I've observed this when running cypress locally with npx cypress run on MacOS 10.14.5, and I've also seen the same issue when Cypress is running in GitLab CI.

This is with Cypress 3.4.0.

[bahmutov]

Let me take a look, because missing last frames of the video are very annoying, seeing it in https://github.com/bahmutov/cypress-test-clock

We should probably wait better for the video frames to arrive after the spec is over and before we close the Electron browser.

[WillsB3]

Having thought about this a little more - I wonder if what I was seeing is more related to #4722 - Perhaps the video is freezing during the last test and so it appears as though the video is being cut off when actually it's missing frames because of the freezing…

[bahmutov]

yeah @WillsB3 the freezing of the video seems to be a different issue from us closing the Electron before last video frames are received and encoded.

[cypress-bot]

The code for this is done in cypress-io/cypress#4804, but has yet to be released.
We'll update this issue and reference the changelog when it's released.

[cypress-bot]

Released in 3.4.1.

[Dksoni81291]

I'm using Cypress v3.5.0, but still I'm not getting full video execution of my spec file run.

[rightsaidjames]

We are using 3.6.1 and are still encountering missing frames at the end of passing test runs. One workaround I've discovered is that if we add a cy.screenshot() command in an after block in index.js then the video will cut off at the point that the screenshot command is fired, hence all of the tests will have completed at the point that the video cuts off:

... but obviously this workaround probably isn't very performant, and it still doesn't show the final state of the test run - it just so happens that the final state (the taking of the screenshot) is no longer important.

[jennifer-shehane]

If you're experiencing a bug similar to this in Cypress, please open a new issue with a fully reproducible example that we can run. There may be a specific edge case with the issue that we need more detail to fix.