Then I tried Reflector, which acts as an AirPlay receiver...

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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.

Like 19 April at 16:44 | Open on hachyderm.io

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sam henri gold

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.
@panic has a great post exploring this: https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surprise/

19 April at 16:46 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

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...

the ipod on the home screen connected and mirrored to my TV

a closeup of the TV output showing the Reminders app. the text has a fuzzy halo around the edges.

19 April at 16:48 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

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:

19 April at 16:49 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

after restoring iOS a SECOND time, I installed an HTTP proxy to see what was going on. Set a breakpoint for every time it calls to any Apple server. Sure enough, upon connecting the adapter it fetches this XML file: http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_MobileAccessoryUpdate_haywire/com_apple_MobileAsset_MobileAccessoryUpdate_haywire.xml

That has to be the culprit. So I edit the hosts file on the iPod to block mesu.apple.com, test everything out, and it works like a charm. Connected the Elgato to a PC since the Mac doesn’t like it, and here we are. The most bootleg setup.

Expand text...

the ipod with a bunch of wires streaming out of it and into a Windows laptop

19 April at 16:50 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

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.

19 April at 16:51 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

So, just to recap, for the BEST possible iOS 6 screen recording:
0. Ideally, use a 30-pin retina device since the 30-pin adapter doesn’t have the compression issue.
1. Buy a Lightning AV adapter, capture card.
2. Add mesu to the device’s hosts file
3. Use Windows + the Elgato software to record.