[Bug]: Video recording on Windows opens a visible console window for ffmpeg #43515

Version

playwright-core 1.64.0-alpha-1790635538000, as bundled in @playwright/cli 0.1.22.

Steps to reproduce

1. On Windows 11 with Windows Terminal as the default terminal application, install @playwright/cli@0.1.22 globally and run playwright-cli install-browser ffmpeg.
2. Run playwright-cli -s=demo open https://example.com --browser=chrome.
3. Run playwright-cli -s=demo video-start demo.webm.
4. Wait a few seconds, then run playwright-cli -s=demo video-stop and playwright-cli -s=demo close.

Expected behavior

No window appears. The browser is headless, and the recording runs in the background.

Actual behavior

A Windows Terminal window titled with the path of ffmpeg-win64.exe opens at step 3 and stays open until video-stop. An agent that records every run opens one of these windows per recording, so windows keep popping up and stealing focus.

Additional context

The video recorder starts ffmpeg through launchProcess, which builds its spawn options without windowsHide. Since #42155 the CLI session daemon is spawned detached with windowsHide: true, so the daemon has no console. A console program it starts therefore gets a new console window of its own. When Playwright runs inside a terminal, ffmpeg inherits that terminal's console instead, which may be why this shows up mostly with the CLI. That last point is inferred, not measured.

#41630 asked for windowsHide on every launchProcess call and was closed as not planned. Per #40741, an earlier attempt, #38776, was reverted in #39994 after it broke Inspector, codegen and UI mode in #39990. ffmpeg has no GUI, so passing windowsHide: true for the ffmpeg launch alone avoids that risk.

This local patch to the bundled lib/coreBundle.js removed the window:

   const spawnOptions = {
     detached: process.platform !== "win32",
     env: options.env,
     cwd: options.cwd,
     shell: options.shell,
+    windowsHide: options.windowsHide,
     stdio
   };

           command: this._ffmpegPath,
           args,
           stdio: "stdin",
+          windowsHide: true,

With the patch applied, I polled every visible top-level window every 250 ms during a recording. ffmpeg was running, no window appeared, and the saved webm was a normal 89 KB file.

Environment

• OS: Windows 11, build 10.0.26200
• Node.js: 22.11.0
• @playwright/cli: 0.1.22
• Browser: Chrome 155.0.8059.84 through --browser=chrome
• Default terminal application: Windows Terminal