Recording the screen of your phone can be fun, especially if you want to show off your prowess at some games to your friends. All you can do is capture the video your onscreen maneuvers and share it with them. For high-end techies and app developers, it might be a serious business though. Be it for capturing the video of troubleshooting steps to share it with their customers, or creating a demo video of a newly released app, recording the screen of their Android phone is a requirement, which has now been much easier by Google.
You can perform this task in two ways. By installing a third-party app, you can make it do the difficult job of the underlying technicalities. Moreover, you don’t need a computer, which otherwise has to be plugged into your phone if you wish to use the other method, which is the prescribed way. Discussed below are both the ways that you can choose from based on what works for you.
Using Third-party App
While there are dozens of screen recording apps available on the Google Play Store, you need to choose the one that has useful features and easy to use. One such app is the AZ Screen Recorder which is available in both free version and paid version. Apparently, the paid or premium version has advanced functionalities and comes with no ads.
Once you download and install it from the Play Store, it just takes a few seconds to get ready, following which a small window pops up with a handful of buttons that includes – Settings, Record, Screenshot, and Images, along with a button that says – Market. However, the only ones you’d need are Settings and Record buttons. You can also access these features from the notification bar entry if you wish to.
Under the Settings, there are a couple of primary options that you can tweak if you like to, which include the frame rate and video resolution. These lesser the frame rate and resolution, the easier it would be for you to share the video due to its lightweight, but as it appears, you’d be compromising on the quality. In addition to these, there exist several other features that can be worth trying if you’re interested. Once you’ve done with your tweaks, you can then pull the shade down and tap the Record button to initiate a video, capturing everything that you’d do on your phone. A small window would pop up, signaling the same, along with a timer that counts the length of the video.
When done with the recording, all you have to do is to pull the shade back down and tap the Stop button. The window pops again, with options that let you improve the video if you wish to. If you don’t, it gets saved to your device with a default name. You can run the video on any video app and share it with your friends like you always do.
Using ADB
Though it is the recommended method from the makers, it is a bit difficult task to perform and needs a bit of technical finesse. It starts with getting your Android phone into developer mode, for which you need to go the Setting tap the Build number seven times under the About section. Next, enable the USB debugging option by ticking it and confirm your choice. You also have to make sure the USB storage option is set to Camera (PTP) and not the Media device (MTP), which you can choose from the drop-down notification list.
You then have to plug your Android phone and PC together, which would let you view your phone’s screen on the computer. Next, you would need the Android SDK software package to be installed on your PC based on its OS, which you can get it for free online. Once installed, your computer can start giving screen capture commands to your phone.
The next step is to open the command prompt and get to the location where you extracted the Android SDK package. You need to open the prompt from the SDK/platform-tools folder and type in the command: adb shell screenrecord/sdcard/your_video_name.mp4, to start the screen recording. You can then perform all the tasks on the phone that you wish to record, and once done, you can stop the recording by press Ctrl+C (or Cmd+C for Mac) on your computer. Subsequently, you can open the video file and edit it if you wish, before sharing it with your loved ones.
