spice-record

This is a simple utility for recording a SPICE sesion to MP4 video. It uses libvirt to connect to the VMs, SpiceClientGLib to access the graphics device, and FFmpeg to encode MP4 videos.

Usage

usage: spice-record [-h] [--vcodec VCODEC]
                    [--loglevel {DEBUG,INFO,WARNING,ERROR,CRITICAL}]
                    [-r FRAMERATE] [-c LIBVIRT_URI] [-o FILENAME]
                    DOMAIN-NAME|ID|UUID

positional arguments:
  DOMAIN-NAME|ID|UUID   Machine to record

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --vcodec VCODEC       Set the output video codec (see "ffmpeg -encoders" for
                        choices)
  --loglevel {DEBUG,INFO,WARNING,ERROR,CRITICAL}
                        Set the logging level (default=WARNING)
  -r FRAMERATE, --framerate FRAMERATE
  -c LIBVIRT_URI, --connect LIBVIRT_URI
                        Connect to hypervisor (e.g. qemu:///system)
  -o FILENAME, --output FILENAME
                        Output filename (defaults to <domain-name>.mp4)

Requirements

• Python 3
• libvirt-python (not libvirt-glib)
• spice-glib
• pygobject3
• ffmpeg

If virt-manager is installed on a modern distro (which has ported all of its Python apps to Python 3), then everything should already be installed, aside from ffmpeg.

---

Handling requirements on Ubuntu jammy:

libvirt-python

sudo apt update && sudo apt install libvirt-dev -y

spice-glib

sudo apt update && sudo apt install libspice-client-glib-2.0-dev -y

pygobject3 or PyGObject

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg libgirepository1.0-dev gcc libcairo2-dev pkg-config python3-dev gir1.2-gtk-4.0 -y

ffmpeg

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg -y

Finally, resolving pypi dependencies:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Notes

Currently, the spice server only supports a single client connection. When another connection is opened, the current one is disconnected. Thus, this utility is limited in its usability as it cannot record a user interacting with the VM, and only an automatic ongoing process. There is however, an experimental feature to enable multiple concurrent connections to a single spice server.