An even better way of taking screenshots on Android

Just thought I’d mention this because I found it handy.

A while back AaronMT wrote up some clever instructions on taking Android screenshots by dumping the contents of ‘/dev/fb0’ and running ffmpeg on the results. This is useful, but you need to know the resolution of the device you have connected to pass the right arguments to ffmpeg. Wouldn’t it be better if you had just one script that would work for whatever device you had plugged in?

In fact, there is a way to do this using the monkeyrunner utility. Intended mainly as a tool for synthesizing input on Android (more on that some other time), you can also easily get a capture of the Android screen with its python/jython API (assuming you have the Android SDK installed). Here’s a quick script which does the job:

from com.android.monkeyrunner import MonkeyRunner, MonkeyDevice
import os
import sys

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
    print "Usage: %s <filename>" % os.path.basename(sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(1)

device = MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection()
result = device.takeSnapshot()
result.writeToFile(sys.argv[1], 'png')

Copy that into a file called capture.py (or whatever), then run it like so:
<br /> monkeyrunner capture.py screenshot.png<br />

And you’re off to the races! Nice screenshot, no utilities or non-essential command line arguments required!

(credit to this stackoverflow answer for the idea)