Display, record and control an android device

— 2 minute read

As a mobile QA engineer I find myself recording screen videos almost every day.

I've been using the command line tool scrcpy for this for a while now.​

It can be used to display your android phone screen, to control it using the mouse and keyboard (great for demos) and also record.

Prerequisites

  • ADB installed on your computer
  • USB Debugging enabled on your phone
  • Phone connected to computer with USB cable for best results (wifi also possible)

Benefits

What I like most about this solution is that it is very lightweight and fast. I use Quicktime for iOS and that always takes longer. Being a command line tool you can also script it and use aliases.

I frequently use the following aliases:

alias demo='scrcpy -t'

Used to demo features with touch visible (-t) so people can see the clicks, does not record.

alias record='scrcpy -t -b2M -m800 --record /Users/thomas/Downloads/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).mp4'

Record (--record) in low resolution (-b2M -m800) to use with bug reports, automatically uses the current date and time as filename ($(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).mp4) and saves it in the same folder.

alias recorddemo='scrcpy -t --record /Users/thomas/Downloads/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).mp4'

Used to record demo videos of new features to showcase, in high resolution.