Display Recorder

Display Recorder is an iPhone app for jailbroken iPhones available in Cydia that records avi video of your live iPhone screen. This is the equivalent to screencasting software like ScreenFlow but for your iPhone. Great for recording game or app trailer demos, and you can upload the videos directly from DisplayRecorder to your YouTube account. You can then either download the video out to your computer via a web interface or uploaded it directly to YouTube from within the app itself. Display Recorder also comes with a Live View which basically lets you browse your iPhone from a web page so you take screenshots as you need them.

There are a few downsides to the app, namely it doesn’t record any sound, and you can’t play back the movies you record directly in the Display Recorder app itself.

Display Recorder is developed by Ryan Petrich and you can buy it for $4.99 in Cydia App store. If you’ve ever wanted to capture directly what is on your iPhone screen, Display Recorder is the answer.

Once you open Display Recorder you will see a blank list where you will eventually see all your recorded videos. Tap the + button to start a new recording. For more control and precision, you can start recording using gestures, or other customizable commands. The default command is holding down the power button for 2 seconds. This default setting is a good method, just be careful not to hold the button down too long to avoid accidentally turning off your iPhone. You will see a menu pop-up asking you if you want to start recording display. Tap Record to begin. The app shows where you tap on the screen using a white circle. When you’re done, hold down the power button down again until you see a message stating “recording completed.” Go back into the app and you’ll see your new video. Each video has thumbnail image, date and time recorded, file size, and video length listed. Tap any video to see a menu letting you either delete the recording or Upload to YouTube. Unfortunately you can’t watch the video in the app itself.

To get the video to your computer there is a web based interface. Tap the “enable” button to start a local web server in you local WiFi network. Enter the url and port number provided in a web browser on your Mac or PC to see a nicely formatted view of your videos. Here you can right click on any video and save it. Tap the Live View button on this page to see a live picture of your current iPhone screen, inside an iPhone frame. What’s really cool about this live view is that all the buttons are active including the home button and the icons, so you can use this to actually navigate around your iPhone and take screenshots as you need them. Finally on the web view you can tap to take a Screenshot of any page you’re on and save it as a jpeg.

Go into the Settings app and find Display Recorder where you can customize how you want to initialize a recording and many other options. Here is a list of all the options in Display Recorder:

– Frame rate: The default is 20fps. You can change it using a slider from 8 to 20 frames per second. You can also lock the frame rate adjustments.
– Rotation: Choose either Portrait, Upside Down, Landscape Left and Landscape Right
– Video Quality: Low, Medium, High
– OpenGL capture: On/Off
– Grayscale: On/Off
– Scale: Full/Half
– Show Taps: When Recording, Always, Hidden
– Tap Size: Medium, Large, Small
– Web Server: On/Off
– Activation Methods: Supports Activator events including Headset Button, Home Button, Lock Screen, Motion, Power, Sleep Button, Slide In Gesture, SpringBoard, Status Bar, Volume Buttons
– YouTube: Username/Password

A user’s guide is also provided that you can view online.

Bugs and Issues:
– The app causes a SpringBoard crash once in a while and generally feels unstable.
– For whatever reason you can’t stop a recoding sometimes. When you perform the action to stop a recording, the app accidentally thinks you want to record a new video, even though it is already recording.
– Tried to upload a 1 minute video to YouTube and it didn’t work. Tried it with a 1 second video and it worked fine.
– The web view page sometimes does not respond. The only way out of it is to quit your web browser, delete your cookies and try again.
– No audio is recorded with the app. This is not clearly stated in the app’s description. Even the demo video for the app contains audio as shown below which adds to the confusion.

Here is a video demo of the Display Recorder app on the iPhone

Use iPhone mods and hacks at your own risk! Installing 3rd Party iPhone apps requires you to jailbreak the iPhone before installing the native software and apps. Browse the full list of all iPhone and iPod touch jailbreak apps filed under the software category.

AppSafari Rating: 3/5

AppSafari review of Display Recorder was written by Joe Seifi on February 5th, 2011 and categorized under Cydia Apps, Utilities, Video. Page viewed 12534 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.