iOS: Using AirServer To Capture iPad Videos

This is a fairly quick blog post that's come up because we have a user requirement to allow them to record how an application works and then "validate" the recording allowing the application to be released.

The issue came up of how we achieve this without sticking a video camera over someone's shoulder and I stumbled upon the "AirServer" application available here;

http://www.airserver.com/

Interesting I've been using the applicaiton for a while and ended up using Camtasia (for Mac) to capture the video being displayed on my screen. This was a little complicated and very prone to juddering if my Mac was busy doing something else at the time (i.e. running Parallels).

A few months ago AirServer seems to have received an update which allows it to natively record the displayed video (and audio). This seems to work very well, I've updated a video of a short recording I made opening Safari and browsing to a website below;

If you want to see the video on YouTube it's available;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GlNCsVW66c

The video, at 45 seconds in length, came to around 14MB (approx. 1/3MB per second - an hour will cost you over 1GB which is about right). The capture is from a retina iPad at 1440x1080.

Setting this up is fairly easy in that you just need to go into Airplay Mirroring on your iPad (providing both are connected to the same network of course!) and turn on Airplay Mirroring;

Then it's just a simple matter of pressing the "Record" button on AirServer once to start it, then again to stop it, and entering the name of the file you want to create.