Turn off video recording by default

[jennifer-shehane]

What would you like?

Cypress has always recorded video by default by default during cypress run. Video recording can be turned off by users by updating their configuration file or passing in an environment variable to change config at runtime to set video: false.

We'd like to have video: false set by default for all users, so that video recording is turned off by default. Any user can set video: true to record video.

Why is this needed?

Videos are oftentimes not the best source for debugging Cypress tests that ran in a non-local environment because in some situations videos can be choppy or unavailable (especially in under resourced machines). Videos are also not as useful as the feature to capture and display all logs for debugging that our team is working on. Additionally recording video on lower resourced machines impacts the performance of tests, resulting in slower runtime.

Other

Release and implementation strategy has yet to be determined, but this could be result in a breaking change for existing users.

[margarita-markova]

Also same will be helpful for other artifacts. I want to have a turn on/turn off option for every artifact: screenshots, videos, report files, etc.

[samvloeberghs]

Additionally recording video on lower resourced machines impacts the performance of tests, resulting in slower runtime.

FYI: this is the main reason we would like this feature.
The compression part is the slow part on typical CI/CD machines like those of Github actions.
We would only turn it on in case we need to debug during CI/CD flows only.

Does an option exist to turn it on dynamically with an flag, that would be nice as well. Using ENV variables?

[MDG-JHowley]

Does an option exist to turn it on dynamically with an flag, that would be nice as well. Using ENV variables?

CYPRESS_video=false
CYPRESS_videoCompression=false

ref: https://docs.cypress.io/guides/references/configuration#Environment-Variables

[jennifer-shehane]

We have made the decision to have video set to false for all users by default. This will go out in a breaking change (likely v13) and will be released alongside our feature to capture and display all logs for users recording to the Cypress Cloud.

[jennifer-shehane]

The code for this is done, but this has yet to be released. We'll update this issue and reference the changelog when it's released.

[jennifer-shehane]

Released in Cypress 13.0.0.