Wanna record a short gameplay, app tutorial or app review from your android screen? In the older versions of Android OS, we had to install a expensive third party screen recorder app and most of them didn’t perform upto expectation as they were laggy or bug filled or required root. However, the latest Android 4.4 Kitkat has a built-in feature that allows you to video record your android phone or tablet screen with the default duration of 3 minutes which of course you can modify to your liking. Also, this KitKat feature requires no root access.You’ll have to download one file on your computer, connect your android device to your PC via USB and then simply run commands to start the screen recording. Here is how you can screen capture or record your android screen:
- Download Android SDK for Windows or Mac OS X (Scroll down for Linux versions)
- Download Universal ADB Package
- For simplicity, extract the Android SDK package to C:/ and install the ADB package. Enable Developer option and then enable USB Debugging
- Connect your Android device to the computer via USB.
- Now open your Android SDK folder, the one you just extracted. For simplicity you can rename your “adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030” folder to something simple like “a”.
- Open you windows command prompt terminal by pressing start (the Windows logoed key) and typing “cmd” and then hit enter. You can also open command prompt by pressing ‘Start’ and ‘r’ in your keyboard, then type ‘cmd’ and press enter.
- Inside the Command prompt navigate to the platform-tools folder. Type this command- C:/Android SDK/a/sdk/platform-tools/ (or simply copy paste this command to your command prompt window ). Remember. The folder name in the above command is “a” because you renamed it in step 4.
- Verify that your ADB drivers are working by typing ‘adb’ in your command terminal. You should see some adb related information fill up the command terminal.
- Finally, here is the command that is going to record video of your screen: adb shell screenrecord –bit-rate 8000000 –time-limit 30 /sdcard/video1.mp4 Here the bit-rate is set at 8 Mbps (4Mbps is default) , the duration is 30 seconds (default time is 3mins) and the video file is named “video1” . To stop the video capture press ctrl+c. If you just want to go with the default settings then simply type this command– adb shell screenrecord /Video1.mp4
- After the recording is over, you can also pull the recorded video to your PC from your Android’s Sdcard. Here is the command: adb pull /sdcard/video1.mp4 C:/insert-any-filename-here.mp4
These steps might seem overwhelming for the beginners who rarely use the command terminal in their PC. However, if you don’t get it right the first time, the second time you definitely will and the third time it’s a breeze. Have fun recording.
