fix(playwright): keep recording when a single screenshot fails

[totigm]

Recording a real site could fail outright and report only this:

Error: No frames were captured. The recording window may have been too short,
or the page may not have rendered any frames before the callback completed.

Neither suggestion was the cause. The actual cause was one screenshot failing.

What was happening

packages/playwright/src/recording/capture.ts treated any page.screenshot() rejection as terminal — set stopped = true and return. So a single transient error meant zero frames from that point on, and if it happened early, zero frames at all. The export then failed with a message describing two things that had not gone wrong.

A transient Page.captureScreenshot: Unable to capture screenshot is ordinary on a page under load; a heavy animation or a font swap is enough to make Chromium miss one.

The tell was eleven lines up, where a failed frame write already did the right thing:

// A single failed write drops one frame but doesn't poison the queue

Writes tolerated failure; screenshots did not. The two paths now agree.

Behaviour now

Case	Before	After
Transient screenshot error	recording lost	frame dropped, recording continues
Page closed mid-capture	stops, with a warning	stops, silently — an expected end, not a fault
Persistent failure	stops on the first one	stops after 10 consecutive, with a clear message
Warning volume	once, then dead	once per run of failures, not once per frame

The failure counter resets on every success, so scattered misses across a long recording never accumulate into a false give-up.

Verification

5 unit tests driving the loop with scripted screenshot behaviour: transient recovery, warn-once, silent stop on a closed page, the consecutive cap actually bounding the call count, and the counter resetting on success.

The real check is the page that found it. https://humanjs.dev reproduced the failure every time and now records through it:

humanjs capture: screenshot failed, dropping frame: ... Unable to capture screenshot
OK — 6 actions, 7946ms      (9.7 MB GIF written)

Whole suite green: lint, typecheck (10/10), test (9/9), build (7/7), check:exports (13/13).

Found while dogfooding #118.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
humanjs	Ready	Preview	Sep 1, 2026 1:31pm UTC