Feature request: reuse the browser, server and page across renderStill calls

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
react, typescript
Domain
backend, tooling

Research direction

Start by reading the implementations and call paths for renderStill, renderFrames, and renderMedia, especially where they start the static server, create the browser context and page, and close them. Compare the current shared-browser lifecycle with the requested caller-owned browser and multi-frame workflow; clarify the API and output-pattern behavior before implementation. Done means callers can control browser lifetime and render multiple frames without repeating page setup.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

We render a lot of stills (thumbnails and frame checks), and each renderStill call has a fixed setup cost. It would help to be able to pass in a browser we own, like Remotion's puppeteerInstance, or even better to render several frames on one loaded page.

To be fair, renderStill does already reuse the shared browser: the same Browser instance served 10 calls in a row when I checked. But each call still starts a new static server, opens a new context and page, loads the bundle (networkidle), waits for __RENDIV_LOADED__ plus a fixed 100 ms, and then closes the page. For a trivial 320x180 composition that's about 0.8 s per still on my machine (Windows 11), and nearly all of it is setup.

Two things would help:

  • a browser option on renderStill (and on renderFrames and renderMedia for consistency), so callers control the browser's lifetime explicitly instead of relying on the module-level singleton and closeBrowser();
  • a way to render several frames in one call (e.g. frames: number[] with an output pattern), so the server and page are only set up once.
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
159
Forks
32
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