 A couple people have PM’d me asking how I did the screen recordings on iOS 6. Strap in. 🧵 Preamble: QuickTime recording was added in iOS 8, on-device capture in iOS 11. Prior to that, there was no official way to screen record. My iPod is jailbroken, so I first looked at tweaks. They ranged from lost media, paid but the payment server was broken, or produced terrible quality. I tried a VNC server but I got roughly two frames/second. 15 comments
Finally, at my darkest hour, I gave in. I went to best buy and bought a Lightning to HDMI adapter, a capture card, and an HDMI cable. It was like $130 all in all. Since the adapter is a tiny AirPlay receiver, I'd STILL be getting compressed video output with MPEG artifacts all over the place. Better than the wireless I got with Reflector, but certainly not a crystal clean output. I got home, plugged the adapter into my iPod, then the HDMI into my TV to test. Voilà. In all its crunchy glory. I unplug and replug the adapter, and...nothing. Black screen. I checked every tweak installed, tried rebooting into safe mode, I could not get it to function again. I tried plugging my iPhone X into the adapter and that worked fine, so what gives?? Eventually I tried restoring the iPod back to the same firmware, and it worked again. Hmm... I saw in one of the comments on that Panic blog post that, when you plug the adapter in for the first time, the OS looks online for a firmware update for the adapter and installs it, which overrides the old adapter firmware baked into iOS. When you reattach, it uses the new one. I unplug, replug again on a clean iOS install and sure enough, it doesn’t work. Something in the new firmware is incompatible with iOS 6. I took a look at the system logs to see what was going on: I made a screen recording playing with the iPhoto app so I could take clips from it later. Here’s that very, very long screen recording: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DYob_OpOFu0 The YouTube compression isn’t even that bad here, the raw output just isn’t exceptional (see the still frame). Oh well. So, just to recap, for the BEST possible iOS 6 screen recording:  @samhenrigold Why dod my heart get all warm and fuzzy seeing this UI? it’s really sending me back 😍 |
Gregory's Server
Then I tried Reflector, which acts as an AirPlay receiver so I could mirror the iPod to my Mac and record *that*. No dice on new versions of Reflector, but I *DID* manage to get it working on Reflector 1.0 from 2014. But it was wireless mirroring from a 2013 device, so the quality was quite poor.