Screencasting your Ubuntu touch device to your computer#

The bundled mirscreencast command-line utility dumps screen-frames to a file. Use it to stream your Ubuntu Touch display to a computer over the network (or directly through ADB) to watch it live or record it to a file.

Using ADB#

You can catch output directly from the adb exec-out command and forward it to MPlayer:

adb exec-out timeout 120 mirscreencast -m /run/mir_socket --stdout --cap-interval 2 -s 384 640 | mplayer -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo w=384:h=640:format=rgba -

timeout above is used to kill the process in a proper manner on the Ubuntu Touch device (120 seconds here). (Otherwise the process continues even if killed on the computer.) Reduce or increase the number of frames per second with``–cap-interval`` (1 = 60fps, 2=30fps, …) and the size of frames 384 640 means a width of 384 px and a height of 640 px. If red and blue colors look reversed you can use format=bgra instead of format=rbga

Via the network#

On the receiver#

For real-time casting:

Prepare your computer to listen to a TCP port (1234 here) and forward the raw stream to a video player (MPlayer here) with a framesize of 384x640:

nc -l -p 1234 | gzip -dc | mplayer -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo w=384:h=640:format=rgba -

For stream recording:

Prepare your computer to listen to a TCP port (1234 here), unpack and forward the raw stream to a video encoder (MEncoder here):

nc -l -p 1234 | gzip -dc | mencoder -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo fps=60:w=384:h=640:format=rgba -ovc x264 -o out.avi -

On the Ubuntu Touch device#

Forward and gzip the stream with 60 FPS (–cap-interval 1) and a framesize of 384x640 to the computer at 10.42.0.209 on port 1234:

mirscreencast -m /run/mir_socket --stdout --cap-interval 1 -s 384 640 | gzip -c | nc 10.42.0.209 1234

Example script#

Run this on a computer (with MPlayer installed and SSH access to the Ubuntu Touch device) to screencast a remote Ubuntu Touch device to it.:

#!/bin/bash
SCREEN_WIDTH=384
SCREEN_HEIGHT=640
PORT=1234
FORMAT=rgba


if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
    echo 'usage: ./mircast.sh UT_IP_ADDRESS , e.g: ./mircast.sh 192.168.1.68'
    exit 1
fi

IP=$1

LOCAL_COMMAND='nc -l -p $PORT | gzip -dc | mplayer -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo w=$SCREEN_WIDTH:h=$SCREEN_HEIGHT:format=$FORMAT -'
REMOTE_COMMAND="mirscreencast -m /run/mir_socket --stdout --cap-interval 1 -s $SCREEN_WIDTH $SCREEN_HEIGHT | gzip -c | nc \$SSH_CLIENT $PORT"
ssh -f phablet@$IP "$REMOTE_COMMAND"
eval $LOCAL_COMMAND

You can download it here: files/mircast.sh

References#