If you want to take Screen Shot of your device, refer post “How to Capture Screenshot in android using adb ?” If you have developed an new app, or want to send someone how one app is behaving on certain screen touches, you will need to record the screen to video. Android provides a commandline tool “screenrecord” which you can use to record the video of your screen. “screenrecord” command records screen activity to an MPEG-4 file.

Execution & Command Syntax

Terminalbash
adb ?” If you have developed an new app, or want to send someone how one app is behaving on certain screen touches, you will need to record the screen to video
Terminalbash
adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/screen_video
Terminalbash
adb pull /sdcard/screen_video

Technical Implementation Details

You can use this file to create promotional or training videos or for debugging and testing. When you want to record the screen for your application, you need to start below command just before you want to start recording and till the command is not stopped everything will get captured in video. $ adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/screen_video.mp4 When above command is started, do whatever activity you want to do on the screen and when you are done stop the command using “Crtl+C” and it will stop the capturing. Now, you can download the video using below command, $ adb pull /sdcard/screen_video.mp4 /sdcard/screen_video: 1 file pulled. 19.5 MB/s (39801324 bytes in 1.945s) Once you downloaded your video, you can install “mplayer” and play using command line as mentioned in “How to play Audio / Video from Ubuntu Linux command line” Other possible options which can be used to finetune recording as per requirement can be viewed with help command as, $ screenrecord --help Usage: screenrecord [options] <filename> Android screenrecord v1.2. Records the device's display to a .mp4 file.

Gotchas and Common Issues

  • Permission Verification - confirm execution permissions and path variables before invoking system binaries.

  • Version Compatibility - check software version release notes for deprecated flags or syntax changes.

  • Log Monitoring - inspect system logs (journalctl or /var/log) to troubleshoot execution failures.

Following these steps ensures clean configuration, proper security boundaries, and reliable execution for adb shell screenrecord.