Err when I said mime encoded I meant base 64 encoded. Brain wrong.

This should be closed in favour of SRC-395 which includes a patch.

Here is a patch that modifies selenium to add an API method for capturing a screenshot and returning it as a string which is a base64 encoded png file. This uses the Robot class to capture the current screen. The API method is called captureScreenshotToString.

I closed SRC-395 as a duplicate of this issue.

My reasons:
1) This issue came first.
2) The implementation behind this issue is instantly cross-language, returning a Base64 encoded string version of the screenshot, instead of a Java-specific BufferedImage.

Read my comments in SRC-395 for more of my commentary. But basically, the good bits in SRC-395, should get reworked as enhancements to this patch. That way, all supported client libraries will get the feature at the same time.

Code has been commited to subversion for this patch:
Core: svn revision 2084
RC: svn revision 2306

Remaining task is add some documentation to the wiki on how to use the new feature. Happy captureScreenshottingToFile, everyone!

It says this is fixed in beta 1 but I get an error when calling the command. I tried the nightly snapshot and that is hosed. when trying to run it.

How can I add just this functionality to beta 1 (i am not a java dev, perl/php, never compiled a jar)

Changed fix version until release of 1.0 only part of the nightly builds available at http://release.openqa.org/cgi-bin/selenium-remote-control-redirect.zip.

Resolved by Erik Beans, patch submitted by Jason Huggins
Core: svn revision 2084
RC: svn revision 2306

Would someone post a code snippet showing how to save the base64 to a file? Be sure to include this in the updated docs too. Thanks for this btw!

In Java:

import java.io.File
import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage
import javax.imageio.ImageIO
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium
import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64

String screenshotString = selenium.captureEntirePageScreenshotToString("");
byte[] imageBytes = Base64.decodeBase64(screenshotString.getBytes("UTF-8"));
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(imageBytes));
ImageIO.write(image, "png", new File("/home/me/screenshot.png");