[Feature]: Automatically stop the screencast video recording and save the video file when the page is closed.

[yusuke-noda]

🚀 Feature Request

Suppose recording is started using page.screencast.start({path: videoPath}). If the page closes before page.screencast.stop() is called to stop the recording, I would like the recording to stop automatically and the video file to be saved.

Example

await page.screencast.start({path: 'video.webm'});
await page.getByRole('button', {name: 'close window'}).click(); // close window
// video.webm file is automatically saved

Motivation

To control the recording area, I want to start recording using screencast.start() rather than the newContext() options.
However, this requires calling screencast.stop() before the page closes.
This makes it impossible to record a video showing "the window closing when a button is pressed."

[github-actions]

Hi, I'm the Playwright bot and I took a first look at this.

This is a valid feature request — today the video is lost if the page closes before screencast.stop(). I confirmed it against the current source: on page close, the page dispatcher's _onDispose returns early for a closed page and never finalizes the recorder, and the client-side stop() (which is what copies the artifact to your path via saveAs) never runs either. So no file is written. There's even an existing test, start should finish when page is closed, that pins this behavior down: after page.close(), page.screencast.stop() rejects with a target-closed error and nothing is saved.

Whether the recording should auto-flush on close is the real design question here — that's a maintainer call.

Where the current behavior comes from

• packages/playwright-core/src/server/dispatchers/pageDispatcher.ts — _onDispose() bails early when this._page.isClosedOrClosingOrCrashed(), so screencastStop() (which stops the VideoRecorder) is skipped on a real page close.
• packages/playwright-core/src/client/screencast.ts — the save happens in stop() (this._artifact?.saveAs(this._savePath)); if stop() is never called, the video is never written to path.
• tests/library/screencast.spec.ts → start should finish when page is closed asserts current behavior: stop() after page.close() throws kTargetClosedErrorMessage, and the file is not checked/saved.

Acceptance test (current vs. desired)

Drops into tests/library/screencast.spec.ts. It passes today against current behavior; the commented block is the requested behavior.

test('should save video when page is closed before stop', {
  annotation: { type: 'issue', description: 'https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/41608' },
}, async ({ browser }, testInfo) => {
  const size = { width: 800, height: 800 };
  const context = await browser.newContext({ viewport: size });
  const page = await context.newPage();
  const videoPath = testInfo.outputPath('video.webm');

  await page.screencast.start({ path: videoPath, size });
  await page.evaluate(() => document.body.style.backgroundColor = 'red');
  await ensureSomeFrames(page);
  await page.close();

  // Current behavior: stop() rejects and the file is never written.
  const error = await page.screencast.stop().catch(e => e);
  expect(error.message).toContain(kTargetClosedErrorMessage);
  expect(fs.existsSync(videoPath)).toBe(false);

  // Desired behavior (feature request): the video is flushed to `path` on close.
  // expect(fs.existsSync(videoPath)).toBe(true);

  await context.close();
});

What I checked

• Read the current page.screencast API surface (class-screencast.md, since v1.59) — no option to auto-save on close.
• Traced the save path client → dispatcher → recorder, as above.
• Confirmed the existing start should finish when page is closed test documents the lost-video behavior.
• Full run: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/actions/runs/28656877134