Add screen recording functions for napari

[GenevieveBuckley]

🚀 Feature

It would be nice if we had screen recording functionality for the napari viewer (this was first suggested in https://github.com/napari/napari/issues/1267).

This feature is dependent on https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/780, so that needs to be merged before any work starts here.

From Juan's comment (link):

if you look at the the IPython display documentation: https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/generated/IPython.display.html there's also the ability to display a video. So it would even be possible to do e.g. napari.record(True), then nbrecording(v) would embed a video of the viewer's interactions.

Other context: We might like to match the structure of screenshot() & nbscreenshot(), see https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/1269

[psobolewskiPhD]

To me this seems like a cool idea, but really niche? The work from napari/napari#780 is now napari-animation so I'd suggest any further developments go in that repo? As of https://github.com/napari/napari-animation/pull/200 napari-animation output can be built into examples pages, so getting it into a jupyter notebook output should be very doable? Anyhow, I think it's a better fit there and we can consider making it part of [all]. @jni any thoughts? you're called out as motivation in the OP 😜

[jni]

whoa, there's an interesting UX idea for napari animation: capture mode: automatic capture of keypoints — every change is a keypoint, with the number of interpolation points set by the desired framerate and elapsed time, and then at the end you'd get a video that would closely match what the user did. The only difference is that frame skips would be interpolated so you'd get super-smooth interaction. Kinda fake news but whatever, seems useful! 😃

I agree, it might make sense to move this issue to napari-animation...

[psobolewskiPhD]

Something to keep an eye on from the prolific @kephale https://github.com/kephale/napari-screen-recorder

[kephale]

I could contribute that kind of functionality to napari-animation, but I really just wanted something simple to make things like this https://mastodon.social/@kisharrington/112905891764696439

[psobolewskiPhD]

💯 @kephale I was just reminded of this thread and thought your new plugin could be useful for someone who comes across it.

[imagesc-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on Image.sc Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.image.sc/t/napari-screen-recorder/101887/1