Screen recording tests

[rjahn]

https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_screen_recording

Could be great for documentation or error reporting.

Start with long-press on title? show options.... choose scree recording -> if active -> show somewhere a stop button...

Better ideas?

[Bungeefan]

It seems that current Screen-Recorder packages are not really supported nor maintained, however, this could be viably alternative which is even a Flutter Favorite: https://github.com/ueman/feedback

[rjahn]

This is a perfect fit!

[rjahn]

Sometimes it would be better to get a video to see what's happening!

Not maintained does not mean not working? So, if a package is working but doesn't have many updates, it's not bad!

[rjahn]

The screen recording package (https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_screen_recording) got an update 5 months ago. Looks alive.

[rjahn]

Every modern mobile OS has screen capture feature, but it's not always clear for the user how to use/enable this feature. So normal app users won't use this for problem reports. If screen recording is not part of the app, we need documentation and this documentation is different for each OS version, vendor... too complex.

So simple screen recording would be great. Best, as part of the feedback module. The feedback module is a nice module and very useful for static problems. If it's not easily possible to integrate screen recording as part of our UI, just use feedback module.

We need an additional feedback action but to implement such feature on server-side we need the communication structure. What do you send in case of a feedback? Just an image/video/text?

[Bungeefan]

Yeah, the OS specific screen captures are not always intuitive.
I already researched and tried some screen recording packages, and they all seem to be neglected.

The screen recording package (https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_screen_recording) got an update 5 months ago. Looks alive.

"The plugin flutter_screen_recording uses a deprecated version of the Android embedding. To avoid unexpected runtime failures, or future build failures, try to see if this plugin supports the Android V2 embedding. Otherwise, consider removing it since a future release of Flutter will remove these deprecated APIs."

The next "popular" package is ed_screen_recorder which seems to be completely broken, as I can't even get it running and there are several issues in the repository that are reporting a similar experience.

---

In case of the feedback package, we are receiving the following object which contains the text and a binary png picture: https://github.com/ueman/feedback/blob/master/feedback/lib/src/user_feedback.dart

[rjahn]

Understood.
If we wrap screen recording, we could replace it in our code easily. If a deprecated API is used, it's ok for now. It's still possible that the API will work in future releases.

So for me, this is not a problem if we have a clean implementation and if it's easily possible to replace or remove the screen recording support.

[Bungeefan]

Nice idea, but unfortunately we can't even do this, it fails already while building:

* What went wrong:
The Android Gradle plugin supports only Kotlin Gradle plugin version 1.5.20 and higher.
The following dependencies do not satisfy the required version:
project ':flutter_screen_recording' -> org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:1.3.61

[rjahn]

OK, so the only thing we can do: Open a new issue for the screen recording project.

[Bungeefan]

For both of these problems there are already issues in the repository, funny enough the package was even updated only 5 days ago, but this was just a dependency upgrade.

[Bungeefan]

Unfortunately, I have bad news regarding the feedback package.
While testing it with our code, I found multiple problems.

Some were fixable on our side (like b3a15b6) and some were not...

• For example, dialogs are effectively broken in the whole app as this package interferes with navigation, a quick research shows that we aren't the only one with this problem:

  • Interference with navigation ueman/feedback#167
  • Dialogs cannot close when pressing device back button ueman/feedback#194
  • Dialog popping issue ueman/feedback#205
  • Dialog is rendered above the Feedback UI ueman/feedback#233

• Another bug is, that on the web the animation gets stuck while reversing it after submitting the feedback.

Summarized, in its current state, this package is also quite unusable for us.
I could try to hot-patch it for our use case, however, this is just an idea, not a verified working solution.