for the documentation of a project I would like to record the screen of my Nexus One as a movie or at least in form of a lot of images, which I can convert into a movie. Is that possible? Is there an app for it? For the moment I only know about this screen capture functions in the SDK's tool directory.
I've use two tools and both work well:
Androidscreencast fps 4-5
Droid#Screen fps 30
Do you need it from the device itself, or would from an emulator do? Here is a Nexus One Emulation Skin.
Here is information about the Dalvik Debug Monitor which claims to:
which provides port-forwarding services, screen capture on the device, thread and heap information on the device
(emphasis is mine)
I am not an Android Developer, so I can't comment on the usefulness of the tool.
As far I know you can only record screen of an Android device from a PC.
You need to use a tool that will put the phone's screen onto PC.
For this you can use Droid#Screen . I use this tool for presentation purposes. Than on PC you use whatever screen recording app.
It is raithe handy to use android 4.x builtin method via adb shell screencap. I wrote a basic PyGtk adbcap wrapper to make it even more simple to use.
Related
Basically I would like to plug in my Android phone to a Linux computer and have it appear as a USB video device such that it can be seen in /dev/videoX and can be opened to capture video / images using the phone's camera.
Are there any specific hardware / Android limitations that would make this infeasible?
What are the general steps involved in making this happen (if at all possible)?
Can it be done as an Android app or does it require completely modifying the Android / kernel?
I assme you want to use your Android Phone as Webcam? There's an App for that. I believe Droidcam was it called. Check it out here:
Droidcam Instructions for Linux
As far as I know, /dev/video0 , /dev/video1 and so on are devices that show up for drivers are based of the V4L2 (Video For Linux Version 2) subsystem.
What are the general steps involved in making this happen (if at all possible)?
The naive developer way would be to write a USB driver that recognizes your phone and registers a V4L2 driver for it. It could be an empty driver.
Can it be done as an Android app or does it require completely modifying the Android / kernel?
I suppose you could build a loadable module (ko) for this.
Please re-purpose your question to what you really want to achieve, as this may not be the right way of doing this.
I was wondering if there was a known camera that was compatible with android OS's. (such as the nexus 7).
I am trying to essentially control a high resolution digial camera from the android tablet so that it can control when to take a picture, and then retrieve the picture.
This would require a camera with a public API.
I have experience in android programming but not too much in communicating between two different devices. So i was wondering what I should look into in order to achieve this.
Here is a camera that runs Android: http://news.yahoo.com/samsung-takes-aim-japanese-rivals-android-camera-034717081--finance.html
And since it is Android I guess that the API is public.
And the same camera with more info: http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/mobile-devices/galaxy-camera/galaxy-camera/EK-GC100ZWABTU and it does run what look like standard android apps.
If you want to control that from another Android device, I think that would make a very interesting project.
The other possibility is the Nikon external control SDK, but I have no idea what language that is in. That was used to build the excellent Sofortbild app for Macs, which controls most Nikon DSLRs. https://sdk.nikonimaging.com/apply/
There are Android applications which can control a set of cameras with added features. The one I'm using gives me the ability to take very specific timelapse shots which would be too complicated or even impossible to get through the camera's own controls. You can find many other control apps on the play store.
Unfortunately this one is only for Canon EOS cameras : DSLR Controller
I am looking for a way of displaying an analog video stream on an android phone. On a pc/mac/etc you can achieve this using a cheap usb analog-digital converter such as a grabby: http://www.terratec.net/en/products/Grabby_82248.html, and then view on VLC, for example.
Would such a thing work (in theory) on android if the proper drivers were available? (ie. are there any hardware issues which make this impossible?)
Does anyone know if such a device with android drivers is available?
Ultimately I want to make an app which interfaces with the grabby (or similar device) and allows the user to view video on the android and capture and send short clips.
First of all the Android device needs to support USB Host. This limits your userbase significantly.
Then there is the problem with power. Some USB Host devices will be incompatible simply because an Android phone will not be able to push enough power through to port to get it running properly.
I'm not sure about the drivers, but I'm 99% sure it won't work "out of the box".
You should certainly take a look at THIS project. It is pretty similar to what you are trying to do. Maybe you should consider getting in touch with that person.
EDIT:
Based on what it took to get that DVB-T dongle running in the project i mentioned above the chances of creating an app that everyone will be able to simply download and use are EXTREMELY slim. Getting that dongle running required using a modified kernel and special scripts. Of course I could be wrong. You can continue the research yourself or wait for someone with more experience than me to reply.
I followed the guide on android.com and compiled the source code. Now it runs well in the emulator. There are some .img files so I think it may be viable to flash them on real devices.
But I see on the guide there is a 4th step, which is to compile some device-specific proprietary files. But my device is not on their list. So what extra work needs to be done if I want to flash the .img files to real devices rather than the emulator? Will the real devices get bricked? Thanks.
well -- that is the "difficult" part of making a custom ROM for a device. You need to have a complex understanding of the particular hardware that you're building for, and adjust and update the codebase accordingly.
That said -- a real device will (probably) not get bricked, but you will need to use the recovery image to put a working ROM back on to use the device again. Make sure you have a rooted device and a decent recovery on it (Clockworkmod)
I have been tasked with sourcing an off the shelf touch pad device that can be used as a dedicated industrial instrument controller.
Is it possible to run a dedicated application and prevent user access to all other functions/applications within Android.
Also is it possible write your own USB device driver which would allow you to connect an USB serial class device?
Of course you can. Like already stated Android is open source. You can take the sources and recode them to your desire so that the device behaves like you want.
In the end the default android launcher and all other applications are all just standard Java applications (mainly). You can recode it so that instead of loading the launcher app it loads up your app.
I think you can use this OS to make your own custom gadgets same as you can use linux in embedded systems.
Its open source so you can go down into the OS code and disable what you like. So i would say it is indeed possible. Windows does also do windows embedded like windows CE/WM range, these have touch screens and come in rugged form factors too, M3,PSION and others.
You can recode the OS visual display, i.e. HTC sense on all their phones. So you could recode it to show nothing.
As to the driver, well a driver is a driver this will also be possible.