How to Record Android Device Screen Easily into a Video

If you want to show your friends how much you scored in the latest Android games, then you can show them your scores – but an even better way is to record your Android screen into a video while playing those games. This way your friends will also be able to see all your moves as you progress through the games play. It is not easy to record the Android screen from within the Android device itself, but using the ADB (Android Debug Bridge) tool, you can record it easily. All you need is a PC, ADB tools installed and a USB data cable.

First of all you have to have ADB tools installed in your PC. You can follow the directions mentioned in a previous article Installing ADB & Fastboot in Windows to install these tools. In your Android device, you must enable the developer options and then the USB debugging as explained in Enabling Developer Options in Android article that we published some time ago.

Once you have taken these steps, connect the USB data cable to your Android device – authorize your PC on the confirmation box that appears in your Android screen. And then open a command prompt window and give these commands :

Now you can do whatever you want to do in Android and it will be recorded on your SD card as “movie.mp4”. Of course, you can change the path and name of the output video file.  It records for a maximum of 3 minutes (180 seconds) and stops. But you can also stop the recording in the middle by pressing Ctrl-C in the command prompt window.

There are many command line options available that let you control the video resolution and time period etc. You can learn about these options at http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html.

Once the video has been recorded, you can either copy it through the data cable or just use the adb command to pull it from the SD card like this:

This will quickly copy the file from the SD card to your hard disk at a desired location. You can delete the video file from SD card after this.

Conclusion: It is extremely easy to record the Android device screen into an MP4 video using the ADB tools. The videos created in this way can be played on any media player including the stock Android video player.