[Feature] Setting ffmpeg path

[cor1]

Hello! Really loving playwright so far, I have run into an issue with ffmpeg, playwright, and aws lambda. I am wanting to use playwright on a lambda function that has ffmpeg in a layer. Is there a way to change the ffmpeg path playwright uses to use the ffmpeg that is brought in from the lambda layer so I can get past the "Please install ffmpeg in order to record video" error?

[JoelEinbinder]

I don't think we have that functionality today.

It's a hack, but you could symlink or copy your ffmpeg binary to ~/.cache/ms-playwright/ffmpeg-1005/ffmpeg-linux.

[cor1]

i will try out your suggestion and report back. Thank you for changing this to a Feature request, I feel it would be very useful to be able to pass that path with the other video options.

[cor1]

just updating for anyone else having the same problem, I couldnt get it to work as I wanted on aws lambda so I moved the code over to gcp cloud run (i prefer that anyways) and used the playwright image and it works great now. I still think it would be useful to set the path though.

[kisscelia]

Need to set the ffmpeg path too. if this, there is no necessary to care about the environments.
thanks.

[Myrannas]

I have playwright running in an environment where I can't download additional binaries, but ffmpeg is already available on the machine.

I've managed to (hackily) get this to work in my environment by modifying the executables in the Registry class; but it'd be great if this was a first class feature.

[pavelfeldman]

Why was this issue closed?

We are prioritizing the features based on the upvotes, recency and activity in the issue thread. It looks like this issue only has a handful of upvotes, has not been touched recently and/or we lack sufficient feedback to act on it. We are closing issues like this one to keep our bug database maintainable. Please feel free to open a new issue and link this one to it if you think this is a mistake.

[ckolumbus]

I do have the same issue but it's motivated by regulatory requirements. I need to archive used packages and be able to reproduce a build only based on archived binaries. This would include our playwright based tests with chromium and ffmpeg. It would be necessary for us to provide a location where the initial install of these tools happen and where we can configure the build later on to re-use the tools that are installed/copied there so that we avoid additional downloads.

[chronotc]

As op has mentioned, they couldn’t get this working on AWS Lambda and had to move to GCP.
The symlink solution isn’t ideal in certain environments.

The library resolves the ffmpegPath to /home/sbx_user1051/.cache/ms-playwright/ffmpeg-1009/ffmpeg-linux which is read-only preventing the creation of the symlink. (only /tmp is available for write on AWS Lambda)

Is there resistance to allow Playwright to read from process.env.FFMPEG_PATH (similar to fluent-ffmpeg) in the registry file and fallback to Playwright’s default ffmpegExecutablePath when the environment variable doesn’t exist?

Yury Semikhatsky (@yury-s)

[kylegwalsh]

I agree with Silla (@chronotc). There is no straight forward way to install ffmpeg on AWS Lambda and an environment variable for FFMPEG_PATH would be a good work around.

This is similar to the approach from the deprecated playwright-video library.

I'm able to upload ffmpeg to a lambda layer, but it ends up being stored in the /proc/1/cwd directory. Playwright can't seem to locate this since it's looking in the cache directory (which doesn't exist).

[juanzolotoochin]

Can this be reopened? it seems like it would be straightforward to support passing an FFMPEG_PATH env variable.

[arquadrado]

Please, reopen this and provide the requested feature.