True story: I finally did it and jailbroken one of my iOS devices. The victim happens to be my faithful first-generation iPad. I did it simply because I wanted to be able to do screencasting on my device.
You see, I have always been a fan of Street Fighter. I downloaded both Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter IV Volt the moment it was released. If you want a fighting game for your iOS device, the Street Fighter series is the one to get.
With the debut of Street Fighter IV Volt, online multiplayer became possible. I’ve spent countless hours before bed playing with people from all over the world. One thing I loved about the game is the ability to save replays of your favorite matches. Some of these replays were epic moments during game play. I hit the maximum amount of 20 replays quickly enough that I find it difficult to let go most of these replays.
At first, I thought of using a digital camera to record the screen while the replay plays. Not a very good idea. Truth be told, I’d even tried using my iPhone 4 to record the game from my iPhone 3GS. I’m a person who looks for perfection and has an eye for detail, and both options created videos that were lousy in quality or simply mediocre.
I did some research and found Display Recorder by famed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich fitting my needs. There are other solutions out there, but Display Recorder gets the most attention. However, nothing’s perfect in this world, and so is Display Recorder. It does screencasting perfectly, but it doesn’t record any audio.
No worries there. We can always improvise. And I’ll tell you how in a while.
So, I set my sights on jailbreaking my iPad since its not my day-to-day device. I’m not going to detail the process of jailbreaking here, simply because jailbreaking is not the focus of this site and you can easily find hundreds if not thousands of articles on the internet regarding jailbreaking with a simple search on Google.
Once the iPad has been successfully jailbroken, I downloaded Display Recorder after paying the small fee of just $4.99.
Before you start screencasting using your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, it’s a great idea to check out Display Recorder’s settings. The default settings are okay, but I’d change it anyways. Display Recorder’s settings are available under the Settings app. Refer to the attached screenshot if you’d like to copy my settings. Here’s the tricky part. The framerate is set using a slider, but there’s no indication of what value is being set. It defaults to 20 frames per second (fps) but I thought I’d set mine to 24 fps. This value is stored in a file located at /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.booleanmagic.displayrecorder.plist. Look for DRFramesPerSecond and change the value to 24.
By default, Display Recorder can be activated by pressing and holding the Sleep button. A prompt will appear to confirm if you want to start recording. Feel free to try recording some screencasts.
Earlier, I mentioned about improvising on Display Recorder’s inability to record audio. My Unibody MacBook Pro came with an audio jack that functions as both audio in and out. What I did was to connect one end of an auxiliary cable into my iPad’s audio jack, and the other into my MacBook Pro’s audio in jack. Here’s a selection of auxiliary cables on Amazon
Now that I have everything setup accordingly, I am ready to record screencasts on my iPad. For Street Fighter IV Volt’s replays, I recorded the replays from start til end. At the same time, audio from the iPad is routed to my MacBook Pro and recorded as well. I end up having two streams of recording on my computer. One for audio and the other being the video.
It’s a matter of dubbing them and synchronizing the audio using any video editing software that you have. Mac users like myself may want to use iMovie that came pre-installed. I’m not a Windows user, but I heard that Windows Movie Maker fits the bill.
Display Recorder isn’t all perfect, as I’ve mentioned above. During my recording sessions, I observed lags and some flickering. But the resulting video came out okay with a little bit of lag, but minus those flickering. I’m perfectly fine with this, since it’s tonnes better than recording by holding another camera or iPhone.
What do you do with the video that you recorded? Well, I uploaded mine onto YouTube, of course!
