chrome-recording

CLI for recording Windows Chrome content from WSL, using ffmpeg's ddagrab.

Prerequisites

• WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
• Chrome running on Windows
• ffmpeg.exe available in PATH (Windows-side)
• powershell.exe available in PATH (Windows-side)
• wslpath available in PATH

Installation

npm install -g @y11i-3d/chrome-recording

Or run directly with npx:

npx @y11i-3d/chrome-recording <subcommand> [options]

After installation, a PowerShell script (get_chrome_info.ps1) is automatically copied to %LOCALAPPDATA%\y11i-3d\chrome-recording\ on Windows. This script is required by the record command.

Subcommands

| Subcommand | Description | | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | | record | Capture Chrome browser content as a video or screenshot | | concat | Concatenate recorded mp4 files into one |

record

Capture the Chrome content area using ffmpeg's ddagrab.

chrome-recording record [options]

By default, recording starts immediately and stops when you press Enter. The output is saved to ./recordings/<timestamp>.mp4.

| Option | Description | | ------------------------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | -s, --screenshot | Take a screenshot instead of recording a video | | -o, --output <file> | Output file path | | -c, --crop <top:right:bottom:left> | Crop in CSS shorthand order (px) | | -m, --manual | Wait for Enter before starting capture | | -d, --duration <seconds> | Stop recording automatically after N seconds | | -q, --quality <value> | Quality: plain number for CRF (e.g. 23), number+unit for bitrate (e.g. 4000k, 4M) | | -f, --fps <fps> | Frame rate | | -v, --verbose | Show ffmpeg output |

Examples

# Record until Enter is pressed
chrome-recording record

# Take a screenshot
chrome-recording record -s

# Record for 10 seconds at CRF 18
chrome-recording record -d 10 -q 18

# Record with manual start and crop
chrome-recording record -m -c 40:0:0:0

# Record to a specific file at 4 Mbps
chrome-recording record -o output.mp4 -q 4M

concat

Concatenate all mp4 files in a directory into a single file (stream copy, no re-encode).

chrome-recording concat [options]

Files named concat_*.mp4 are excluded. Input files are sorted alphabetically.

| Option | Description | | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | -i, --input <dir> | Input directory (default: ./recordings) | | -o, --output <file> | Output file path (default: <input>/concat_<timestamp>.mp4) | | -v, --verbose | Show ffmpeg output |

Examples

# Concatenate all recordings in ./recordings
chrome-recording concat

# Concatenate from a specific directory
chrome-recording concat -i ./clips -o final.mp4