Using ADB to capture the screen

Question

I m trying to get a screenshot of the phone screen as fast as possible  Currently  I am doing   adb shell screencap -p  sdcard screencap png  amp  amp  adb pull  sdcard screencap png            However it is too slow and takes up to 3 seconds  Is there any better way to do this  I intend to use this function with an unrooted phone   Also what are the different arguments I can use for screencap   Thanks   EDIT  extra information   I intend to use this method to be able to get a live feed of the screen onto my pc  The current method works however it is too slow  I can t use adb shell screenrecord because I won t be able to access the video file while it is being recorded

User · Answer

Sorry to tell you screencap just a simple command  only accept few arguments  but none of them can save time for you  here is the -h help output     adb shell screencap -h usage  screencap  -hp   -d display-id   FILENAME  -h  this message -p  save the file as a png  -d  specify the display id to capture  default 0  If FILENAME ends with  png it will be saved as a png  If FILENAME is not given  the results will be printed to stdout    Besides the command screencap  there is another command screenshot  I don t know why screenshot was removed from Android 5 0  but it s avaiable below Android 4 4  you can check the source from here  I didn t make my comparison which is faster between these two commands  but you can give your try in your real environment and make the final decision

User · Answer

To save to a file on Windows  OSX and Linux adb exec-out screencap -p  gt  screen png  To copy to clipboard on Linux use adb exec-out screencap -p   xclip -t image png

User · Answer

You can read the binary from stdout instead of saving the png to the sdcard and then pulling it   adb shell screencap -p   sed  s  r      gt  screenshot png   This should save a little time  but not much   source  Read binary stdout data from adb shell

User · Answer

https   stackoverflow com a 37191719 75579 answer stopped working for me in Android 7 somehow  So I have to do it the manual way  so I want to share it      How to install   Put this snippet of code in your    bash profile or    profile file   snap screen       if      -eq 0     then     name  screenshot png    else     name   1 png    fi   adb shell screencap -p  sdcard  name   adb pull  sdcard  name   adb shell rm  sdcard  name   curr dir pwd   echo  save to  pwd   name     Run source    bash profile or source    profile command       How to use  Usage without specifying filename     snap screen 11272 KB s  256237 bytes in 0 022s  Saved to  Users worker8 desktop screenshot png   Usage with a filename     snap screen mega screen capture 11272 KB s  256237 bytes in 0 022s  Saved to  Users worker8 desktop mega screen capture png   Hope it helps      This will not work if multiple devices are plugged in

User · Answer

To start recording your device   s screen  run the following command   adb shell screenrecord  sdcard example mp4   This command will start recording your device   s screen using the default settings and save the resulting video to a file at  sdcard example mp4 file on your device   When you   re done recording  press Ctrl C in the Command Prompt window to stop the screen recording  You can then find the screen recording file at the location you specified  Note that the screen recording is saved to your device   s internal storage  not to your computer   The default settings are to use your device   s standard screen resolution  encode the video at a bitrate of 4Mbps  and set the maximum screen recording time to 180 seconds  For more information about the command-line options you can use  run the following command   adb shell screenrecord --help   This works without rooting the device  Hope this helps

User · Answer

Using some of the knowledge from this and a couple of other posts  I found the method that worked the best for me was to   adb shell  stty raw  screencap -p   I have posted a very simple Python script on GitHub that essentially mirrors the screen of a device connected over ADB   https   github com baitisj android screen mirror

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