A couple people have PM’d me asking how I did the screen recordings on iOS 6. Strap in. 🧵
Preamble: QuickTime recording was added in iOS 8, on-device capture in iOS 11. Prior to that, there was no official way to screen record.
My iPod is jailbroken, so I first looked at tweaks. They ranged from lost media, paid but the payment server was broken, or produced terrible quality. I tried a VNC server but I got roughly two frames/second.
https://mastodon.social/@lickability/112293994180604838
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/
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...
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:
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.
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