from Hacker News

Scrcpy 2.2 adds Android camera mirroring

by rom1v on 11/4/23, 6:30 PM with 34 comments

  • by jampekka on 11/4/23, 8:20 PM

    Scrpy is awesome and one of those rare pieces of software that has a clear and powerful thing to do and does it so well you get to forget it's even there. Essentially you get the feeling that this is how it should work.

    But at the same time I find it a bit sad example of how much effort to and how much corner case fiddling such conceptually very simple tasks have to take.

    Caricatyring here, but it is essentially just blitting pixels over a network connection. I don't think it should be that hard a task with a more reasonable underlying stack. Plan 9 (and probably many other sadly forgotten systems) showed how something like scrcpy can fall out more or less automatically from a better designed system.

    Maybe I'm underestimating some fundamental complications, but I can't help but feel something has gone very wrong with how we do things with computers. Maybe something like worse is better on piles of previous worse is better.

  • by Scene_Cast2 on 11/4/23, 7:57 PM

    Android 14 was originally supposed to add webcam functionality (IIRC it added an "act as a webcam" option when plugging the phone in via USB in the Betas). The speculation is that although it was removed from the final release, it might be added in a December update.
  • by JeremyNT on 11/5/23, 3:40 AM

    This software just saved my bacon!

    I dropped my phone and the screen broke. The touchscreen worked, but no backlight.

    Luckily I had enabled Android debugging. It took a bit of trial and error but I managed to unlock the phone and then accept the adb key from my laptop.

    After that, scrcpy let me grab all my files and transfer everything to my new phone.

    If you have an android device take a few minutes to get scrcpy set up. It just might let you recover from a dead screen some day.

  • by arcanemachiner on 11/4/23, 7:31 PM

    Such a fine piece of software.
  • by mathfailure on 11/4/23, 11:23 PM

    Which camera app will that use? Can I make it use Vector Camera[1] instead of built-in? So that the picture would be modified by the app, rather than go 'raw' from the camera?

    1 - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.dozingcatsoftware.vector...

  • by clumsysmurf on 11/4/23, 8:57 PM

    Would love to see official Mac binaries along with the Windows ones, that are up to date, etc.