How to index a recorded session mcrec with meshcentral ? screenshot jpg vs PNG / not obvious/practical how to launch player

[guerby]

Hi,

I'm feeling a bit stupid but it took me a good 30 minutes to be able to find how to play a mcrec meshplayer session recorded file.

I could not find anything in the user guide, in the blog there are some screenshots but they do not show how to launch the player:

https://meshcentral2.blogspot.com/2020/02/meshcentral-desktop-recording-indexing.html
https://meshcentral2.blogspot.com/2019/08/meshcentral2-500k-downloads-session.html

I've had no luck as to find where is located the player in the meshcentral web UI.

Until ... I first remote controlled an unrelated computer and then right clicked on the recording camera icon in the top bottom and it proposed me "Open Player" ...

Did I miss a more obvious way to launch the viewer from the meshcentral web UI ? The camera icon appears only when the remote desktop is active, but I think having to remote control a computer just to view a recorded session is not optimal nor obvious.

I found out VLC and mplayer do not recognize the mcrec format.

Also I don't have the fast forward and backward icons, and when I click somewhere in the red bar it doesn't move the video

In my config.json I have :

      "SessionRecording": {
        "filepath": "/opt/meshcentral",
        "index": true,
        "maxRecordings": 10,
        "maxRecordingSizeMegabytes": 3,
        "__protocols__": "Is an array: 1 = Terminal, 2 = Desktop, 5 = Files, 100 = Intel AMT WSMAN, 101 = Intel AMT Redirection",
        "protocols": [ 1, 2, 101 ]
      }

I find nothing in /opt/meshcentral (777 perm mode) when I record or upload mcrec files, did I miss something?

PS: small issue screenshots are named ".jpg" but it seems they are PNG formatted:

file 'Desktop-I5416 (test LG)-2020-05-03-16-26.jpg'
Desktop-I5416 (test LG)-2020-05-03-16-26.jpg: PNG image data, 1440 x 900, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

Thanks again!

[guerby]

Another thing : in the player when I click "open files" and select an mcrec files nothing happens.

Drag and drop an mcrec file works though.

[guerby]

Tried mcrec.js on the server but it doesn't seem to change the file or create a new one

root@meshcentral:~# node /root/meshcentral/node_modules/meshcentral/mcrec.js a.mcrec
Processing file: a.mcrec, 402951 bytes.
TODO-PARTIAL-JUMBO 3 314968 314980
root@meshcentral:~# ls -ltr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 402951 May  3 16:05 a.mcrec
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 402951 May  3 16:07 orig.mcrec
root@meshcentral:~# md5sum a.mcrec orig.mcrec 
5522ba0c52371770a3038e4229297c1d  a.mcrec
5522ba0c52371770a3038e4229297c1d  orig.mcrec

[wh1te909]

Took me a bit to find it too but you can just go to https:/yourmeshsite.com/player.htm to open the player, don't even have to be logged in. It's publicly accessible afaik.

[Ylianst]

All valid points. There is a lot more to do in the area of session recordings. I will have to look at what is going wrong with the indexing when using a locally recorded .mcrec file. The .mcrec files are a set of images with position on the screen and time stamps. It's a made up format I created, basically just a network dump of the remote desktop traffic.

I will try do a bunch of improvements in this area in the coming weeks. Also, interesting the PNG screenshot, I will fix that right away.

[Ylianst]

If you have server side recordings enabled, just Published MeshCentral v0.5.24 with a new "Recordings" panel in the "My Users" section. You can see all of the session recordings and download them there. I also fixed the "Open file" button in the player in this version.

[guerby]

I updated to 0.5.25 and the player isn't working anymore.

"Open File" doesn't open a popup to choose a file (like before), and drag and drop either does nothing or ask me to resave a file (tested with chrome and firefox from linux and windows 10 - this was working before).

I don't see a Recordings tab:

My config.json :

      "SessionRecording": {
        "xxfilepath": "/root/meshcentral/meshcentral-recordings",
        "index": true,
        "maxRecordings": 100,
        "maxRecordingSizeMegabytes": 100,
        "__protocols__": "Is an array: 1 = Terminal, 2 = Desktop, 5 = Files, 100 = Intel AMT WSMAN, 101 = Intel AMT Redirection",
        "xxprotocols": [ 1, 2, 101 ]
      }

I have mkdir meshcentral-recordings next to meshcentral-data (seems to be the default recording path).

I haven't located yet the source code handling recordings and the tab, do you have a suggestion on where to look and what debugging output function I should call to get something in log.txt ?

I noticed in log.txt that the following error is repeated often:

6:44:43 AM - web: 404 Error /scripts/FileSaver.min.js.map

root@meshcentral:~/meshcentral# ls -l ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/*ile*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6729 Jun 11  2019 ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/filesaver.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2608 Jun 11  2019 ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/filesaver.min.js
root@meshcentral:~/meshcentral# md5sum ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/*ile*
e8dc77a0f259a3957db4440a438fcb01  ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/filesaver.js
ef291b8ed898f25826d2bdb5df468c61  ./node_modules/meshcentral/public/scripts/filesaver.min.js

In fileserver.min.js the last line is

//# sourceMappingURL=FileSaver.min.js.map

I changed FileSaver to filesaver (lowercase) no more 404 but player still isn't working.

[guerby]

With 0.5.27 I can record sessions again and open file works, thanks!

But I'm still unable to activate server session recording.

I added a debug trace in webserver.js when it sets the feature:

	    parent.debug('web','LG1');
            if (domain.sessionrecording != null) { features += 0x08000000; parent.debug('web','LG1_has_recording'); } // Server recordings enabled
	    parent.debug('web','LG1_b');

But while I get LG1 and LG1_b in the logs I don't get LG1_has_recording.

In my domain I have:

      "sessionrecording": {
        "filepath": "/root/meshcentral/meshcentral-recordings",
        "index": true,
        "maxRecordings": 100,
        "maxRecordingSizeMegabytes": 100
      }

Do you have a suggestion on where to look (debug code to add) to understand why domain.sessionrecording is null in my meshcentral installation?

[guerby]

Got it, I got a spurious character in "domains" in my config.json file ... Sorry for the noise.

[Ylianst]

Oh good. Thanks for the report. I will close this one, but please open a new issue if needed. I tested the player a bunch of times with drag & drop or "Open File..." button and with "minify":true and different languages and could not see any issue. If there is a problem with the player, please open a new issue and detail your settings, thanks.

[mrkacg1]

@guerby
Where did you get the parameters to configure the recordings in the config.json file? Example: maxRecordings

[flyRV]

@guerby
Where did you get the parameters to configure the recordings in the config.json file? Example: maxRecordings

See sample-config-advanced.json