Android – API’s for Android 4.4 screen recording

androidscreen-capturevideo-encoding

One of the features of Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) is that it provides a way for developers to capture an MP4 video of the screen using adb shell screenrecord. Does Android 4.4 provide any new API's for applications to capture and encode video, or does it just provide the screenrecord utility/binary?

I ask because I would like to do some screen capture work in an application I'm writing. Before anyone asks, yes, the application would have framebuffer access. However, the only Android-provided capturing/encoding API that I've seen (MediaRecorder) seems to be limited to recording video from the device's camera.

The only screen capture solutions I've seen mentioned on StackOverfow seem to revolve around taking screenshots at a regular interval or using JNI to encode the framebuffer with a ported version of ffmpeg. Are there more elegant, native solutions?

Best Answer

The screenrecord utility uses private APIs, so you can't do exactly what it does.

The way it works is to create a virtual display, route the virtual display to a video encoder, and then save the output to a file. You can do essentially the same thing, but because you're not running as the "shell" user you'd only be able to see the layers you created. The relevant APIs are designed around creating a Presentation, which may not be exactly what you want.

See the source code for a CTS test with a trivial example (just uses an ImageView).

Of course, if you happen to be a GLES application, you can just record the output directly (see e.g. EncodeAndMuxTest and the "Record GL app" activity in Grafika).

Related Solutions

Python – way to run Python on Android

One way is to use Kivy:

Open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps.

Kivy runs on Linux, Windows, OS X, Android and iOS. You can run the same [python] code on all supported platforms.

Kivy Showcase app

Android – How to lazy load images in ListView in Android

Here's what I created to hold the images that my app is currently displaying. Please note that the "Log" object in use here is my custom wrapper around the final Log class inside Android.

package com.wilson.android.library;

/*
 Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
distributed with this work for additional information
regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
software distributed under the License is distributed on an
"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations
under the License.
*/
import java.io.IOException;

public class DrawableManager {
    private final Map<String, Drawable> drawableMap;

    public DrawableManager() {
        drawableMap = new HashMap<String, Drawable>();
    }

    public Drawable fetchDrawable(String urlString) {
        if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) {
            return drawableMap.get(urlString);
        }

        Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "image url:" + urlString);
        try {
            InputStream is = fetch(urlString);
            Drawable drawable = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src");


            if (drawable != null) {
                drawableMap.put(urlString, drawable);
                Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "got a thumbnail drawable: " + drawable.getBounds() + ", "
                        + drawable.getIntrinsicHeight() + "," + drawable.getIntrinsicWidth() + ", "
                        + drawable.getMinimumHeight() + "," + drawable.getMinimumWidth());
            } else {
              Log.w(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "could not get thumbnail");
            }

            return drawable;
        } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
            Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
            return null;
        } catch (IOException e) {
            Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
            return null;
        }
    }

    public void fetchDrawableOnThread(final String urlString, final ImageView imageView) {
        if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) {
            imageView.setImageDrawable(drawableMap.get(urlString));
        }

        final Handler handler = new Handler() {
            @Override
            public void handleMessage(Message message) {
                imageView.setImageDrawable((Drawable) message.obj);
            }
        };

        Thread thread = new Thread() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                //TODO : set imageView to a "pending" image
                Drawable drawable = fetchDrawable(urlString);
                Message message = handler.obtainMessage(1, drawable);
                handler.sendMessage(message);
            }
        };
        thread.start();
    }

    private InputStream fetch(String urlString) throws MalformedURLException, IOException {
        DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpGet request = new HttpGet(urlString);
        HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request);
        return response.getEntity().getContent();
    }
}

Best Answer

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