Movie feature and trial version

Eggplant Functional
#1

Good morning all,

Can anyone tell me whether or not I should be able to create movies via Eggplant with a trial license? I tried with version 1.5 and just installed version 2.0 and have had no luck with either thus far.

I have asked the same question of the sales staff but have not received the typically prompt response so I thought it might be wise to pose the question here.

All methods I have tried have produced the same result; once recording starts the application hangs and the script cannot be aborted. Eventually the application must be killed via a terminal session.

Version 1.5 responded to the Dock’s “Force Quit” option but version 2 opens a dialog offering the choice to “Cancel Quit”, “Quit When Run Finishes” or “Abort and Quit”. However since the application has frozen not permitting the script to abort none of these options is viable. Thus a ‘kill’ by terminal session is required to halt the script.

I’ve tried the two methods below to record the movie via scripts…


startMovie "~username/Desktop/SafariTest"
Click "Launch Safari"
Wait "10.0"
TypeCommand "L"
(* snipped rest of code for the sake of brevity *)
stopMovie

…and…


startMovie "~username/Desktop/SafariTest"
Run NewProject
stopMovie

…as well as the “Record Movie” menu option. My desire is to use the movies to pitch Eggplant to my supervisor who is located off-site.

Thanks,

Bill

#2

Hello, Bill:

I’m sorry we weren’t able to get back to you sooner, but your original question was received by support after close of business yesterday.

The movie mode is enabled in all versions of Eggplant starting with 1.5 – if the menu and toolbar commands are available and active then your version supports movie mode. Our testing shows that is working as well in 2.0 as it has in previous versions.

My guess is that the machine that you are running Eggplant on either a) does not have a particularly fast processor or b) has either <512 MB of ram or a number of other processes using up the ram that it does have. Development on the movie mode has not yet reached the level that we plan for it, so it currently is a very resource intensive operation. It is capturing every pixel of the remote screen several times a second and recording the movie at the full dimensions of the screen. There is very little compression and no scaling has been implemented, so the movie files themselves become very large, very quickly (~50MB/minute). Unfortunately, this requires a fair amount of horsepower from the Eggplant machine and a G3 or even an older G4 may have trouble managing the task.

Some things that might help are as follows:[list]Quit any other applications you are running on the Eggplant machine to free up as much of the CPU as possible.

Reduce the resolution at which the SUT is running. This will reduce the dimensions of the captured screens and the number of pixels that Eggplant must process.

Go into Eggplant>Preferences…>Run Options>Screen and increase the Search Delay component of the Image Search Time. This might help because that will reduce the frequency at which Eggplant searches the screen, perhaps giving the movie thread more access to the CPU.

There is also a slight possibility that some third-party system mods can interfere with Eggplant’s operation. We have seen problems in the past that appeared to be related to the APE extension from Unsanity. I myself could not record movies until I removed that extension from my system.
[/list:u]
We do intend to make improvements to this feature for a future release, including scaling and compression. We have, in part, been waiting for users to tell us that it’s a feature that they are using or would use, and that’s been slowly starting to happen. We appreciate any feedback anyone cares to provide on what features they would like to see this function provide.

Regards,
Matt Hicks