The Android SDK has a great function for recording your smartphone’s screen. It’s called “screenrecord,” which is used with adb.exe.
Instructions on using this can be found here.
Some caveats come with this though.
- The smartphone has to be connected to the computer via USB cable.
- It can only record a maximum of 3 minutes of video.
- It can only record video, not audio.
So, to solve the audio issue, you can use one of the fantastic apps that are available for your smartphone. However, most of the ones that I found record from the microphone, not internally. So this means, you’ll have to be “recording studio” quiet when recording.
The solution that I ended up using was the old-fashioned method of hooking up an audio cable from the smartphone’s audio jack, into the microphone jack of my computer. It took a while to fiddle around with the settings, especially since I rarely use my microphone. The key to getting it working is when looking at the Properties screen for your sound recording device, there’s a “Listen” tab, which has a checkbox for “Listen to this device”. After flipping that on, I heard my phone’s audio on the computer’s speakers.
I initially tried using stock Sound Recorder that comes with Win7, but while it’s a good enough solution, I went with Audacity instead.
So, using adb’s screenrecord and traditional audio jack recording, I was able to capture some gameplay for Number Crunchers.
I still have to splice it all together and edit it, but just wanted to put this one out there in case it actually helps someone.
