Saturday, August 01, 2020

SCRCPY - No Frills Tool for Android Screen Mirroring

If you are Android user and wanted to Mirror your mobile or tablet screen on your laptop for presentations or want to control your phone from your computer without having to switch between the devices every now and then SCRCPY is the tool for you. It is OpenSource, free and easy to setup. Works out of the box once you enable Developer Options and Switch on USB Debugging on your Android Device.

Once it is setup, you can control your device from your computer using Keyboard and Mouse, make use of the larger screen real estate of your computer instead of your tiny mobile device screen. You can check your SMS, notifications, open your favorite apps, play games etc all from your computer. Best part - it works on Windows, Linux and MacOS

Now lets get to work.

First download SCRCPY that is suitable to your OS from the Github page link below


It would download a Zip file that you can unzip to a location of your choice.



Enable USB Debugging on your Device
1. Make sure your device is running on Android 5.0 or higher. You can get this information from About section in settings of your device
2. Enable Developer Options on your Device. To do this tap 7 to 8 times on the Build Number in the About section in the Settings screen
3. You will see that message will be displayed saying Developer Options have been enabled on your device
4. Now Return to the main Settings page and select Developer Options and scroll down to find USB Debugging and enable it.

Now Connect your device to your computer using a USB cable and in couple of seconds you would see a prompt on your phone to accept the fingerprint of the Computer, select allow this computer and click 'OK'

Got to SCRCPY folder and launch scrcpy-noconsole with Admin Privilege, on Windows you can right click and select run as administrator, on Linux and Mac OS you can launch it as super user from terminal. If everything worked as expected it would show up your mobile screen on your computer


1. Use your Mouse right click to wake your device.
2. Use left click to interact with your device.
3. Use Ctrl+R on keyboard to Rotate the screen
4. You can also Use Ctrl+P to Wake your device.

By default the mirroring function would keep the actual screen device active. Use Ctrl+O to Poweroff
the device screen, however, SCRCPY window would be still available for use

You can now launch your favorite apps on your phone without even touching your phone all from your computer with all the convenience of Keyboard and Mouse.

To take it to next level you can actually configure SCRCPY to work on Wifi so that you can get rid of the USB cable between your device and computer. For this follow below steps.

Make sure your Android Device and Computer are connected to the same WiFi network.
Find out the IP address of your Android Device from WiFi advanced settings

Connect your Android Device to your computer using the USB cable.
Open Command prompt in admin mode, navigate to SCRCPY folder and run below two command
adb tcpip 5555
adb connect DEVICE_IP:5555 (Replace DEVICE_IP with IP address your Android Device)


Disconnect cable from the device and launch scrcpy-noconsole

Now you can mirror your phone to your computer without any cable. Isn't it cool.

You can play games, watch OTT content from Apps that cannot be accessed on your computer, dial your contacts or receive calls, send and read SMS all without touching your mobile device or while it is charging in other room.


Reference:
https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb#wireless
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuTdxa-w1js

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