Monday 9 May 2016

Android Screen Recording on Mac

Scenario:

For one of the apps we are developing, I needed to make a screen cast of some strange behaviour inside the app on Android. But how can you record screen activity from a Android device on Mac OS X?

Solution:

After a little bit of searching, the solution was actually pretty simple. You need to do the following:

1. Install the Android Tool
Download the Android Tool from GitHub (please check out the GitHub project page to keep track of updates and news). The download gave you a zip file. Unzip the file and place the tool inside the application folder on your Mac.

2. Prepare your Android device
In order to be able to establish a successful communication between your Android device and the Mac, you have to enable the 'Developer Options'. Inside the Developer Options, you need to enable the 'USB Debugging' feature. If you like, you can also enable the feature that shows your touch actions on the screen.

3. Launch the Android Tool
Start the Android Tool (note: you may get the warning that the app is from an unidentified developer). Once the app is opened, simply plug in your Android device

4. Start Recording
The tool is as easy as it can be:
Click on the camera button to take a screenshot or click on the camcorder button for a screen recording. When done with screen recording, press the red square (stop) button which appeared on the camcorder button place. You can record as long as you wish :).
The files created will be stored in an 'AndroidTool' folder on your desktop.

Note: You won't be able to record audio with this tool and neither you can take screenshots of record videos of protected videos.

Last tip: once you have your screencast video file, put it through Handbrake. This will decreases you file size a lot (e.g. 8.3 MB to 2.4 MB)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I saw you mention that you use handbrake to convert video format. Yes, it is really a free, useful and convenient tool. And I also use it often. Besides, here I would like to share another more powerful Video Converter. Maybe it is another choice for users.

Safe link to the Video Converter: leawo.org/video-converter/

Ralph Carpenter said...

You have mentioned a lot of tools that are helpful and work better on our android gadgets, i have taken note of the handbrake that it is mainly used to convert videos format.

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