Android has had native support for user-taken screenshots since Version 4.0. A few OEMs like Samsung offered this feature even before that. However up until now, getting a reliable video recording of your device’s screen has been quite difficult. It generally involved some kind of root solution that doesn’t work for all hardware or devices. In KitKat, Google is finally offering an official solution to directly record a video from the screen that doesn’t require root and should work across all devices.
The following blog post about the new features and changes of Android KitKat briefly talks about a screen recording utility but fails to provide any details about where to find the utility. So far I haven’t found an app on the device itself that allows to start the screen recording. However you can initiate a screen recording through adb with the following command:
[bash]
adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/nexus5_screenrecord_20131102.mp4
[/bash]
Afterwards you can use the “pull” command to download the video from your phone to your computer:
[bash]
chriss-mbp:Downloads chris$ adb pull /sdcard/nexus5_screenrecord_20131102.mp4
4689 KB/s (18875465 bytes in 3.930s)
[/bash]
The video quality is truely remarkable. I created a short recording to demonstrate the screen recording feature.