· 1 min read

How to record video using XCode Simulator

# Dev Note
This article was auto-translated from Chinese. Some nuances may be lost in translation.

Using screen recording can be quite cumbersome, especially since you have to manually adjust the frame each time. So, I looked into whether it was possible to record video using the simulator, and I found that it actually is—and surprisingly simple too! You just need to use a command line instruction:

xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo --codec=h264 transition.mp4

After pressing ctl+c, the video file will be automatically generated. Just make sure that there are no files with the same name. Additionally, since I often upload my repros to GitHub, and GitHub doesn’t support video files, I use ffmpeg to convert them into GIF files:

ffmpeg -ss 2 -t 20 -i YOUR_VIDEO_NAME -vf "fps=10,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 OUTPUT.gif

Then I’ll take my time to study the parameters of ffmpeg. In any case, this way I can convert video files into GIF files—awesome!