Capture Videos from Hyper-V VMs using PowerShell

In a recent project I was deploying hundreds of VMs across a large set of Hyper-V Hosts, and I needed to capture the screen output of each VM for documentation and troubleshooting purposes.

Long story short, here is a PowerShell script that will capture still images from the screen of each Hyper-V VM according to the framerate and duration you define (I captured 5 images per second per VM for an hour). The script will then use FFMPEG to create videos, one video per VM, based on the still images.

Script on GitHub: https://github.com/DeploymentResearch/DRFiles/blob/master/Scripts/Hyper-V/SaveVMVideos.ps1

Parameters

Below are the parameters you want to customize. You need to a download a Windows binary of FFMPEG as well. I used the full FFMPEG release from Gyan Dashi: Builds – CODEX FFMPEG @ gyan.dev

$ImageType = "png"
$ImagePath = "E:\temp\vmimages"
$VideoPath = "E:\temp\vmvideos"
$LocalImagePath = "C:\temp\vmimages"
$ffmpegEXE = "E:\Setup\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe"
$RunTimeInSeconds = 2700
$CaptureFrameRate = 2 
$ResultingVideoFrameRate = 10