android-screencast-api

Live Android screen streaming & recording over HTTP — powered by ADB + FFmpeg. Watch a device's screen as an MJPEG stream, grab snapshots, and record MP4 clips, all through a tiny HTTP API.

android-screencast-api pipes adb exec-out screenrecord (raw H.264) into FFmpeg and serves the resulting frames over HTTP as a multipart/x-mixed-replace MJPEG stream. No app install on the device, no root — just adb access.

Features

• 📺 Live MJPEG streaming at configurable bitrate / FPS.
• 📸 Snapshots — one-shot screencap to PNG.
• 🎬 Recording — save an MP4 clip for a fixed duration.
• 🔌 Device discovery — /devices reflects adb devices -l.
• 🐳 Single-container Docker image (ADB + FFmpeg included).

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• adb (Android platform tools) on PATH (or in the container)
• ffmpeg on PATH

Install & run

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m src.stream_server
# open http://localhost:8080/

With Docker:

docker build -t android-screencast-api .
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /path/to/recordings:/recordings \
  android-screencast-api

Usage

# List connected devices
curl http://localhost:8080/devices

# Live stream (open in a browser or VLC)
#   http://localhost:8080/stream/emulator-5554

# Single snapshot
curl http://localhost:8080/snapshot/emulator-5554 -o shot.png

# Start a 30s recording, then stop early if you like
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8080/record/start?serial=emulator-5554&duration=30"
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8080/record/stop?serial=emulator-5554"
curl http://localhost:8080/recordings

API reference

Route	Method	Description
/	GET	HTML landing page
/healthz	GET	liveness probe
/devices	GET	JSON list of adb devices
/stream/{serial}	GET	MJPEG live stream
/snapshot/{serial}	GET	single PNG snapshot
/record/start?serial=&duration=	POST	start recording
/record/stop?serial=	POST	stop recording
/recordings	GET	list saved recordings

Project layout

android-screencast-api/
├── src/
│   ├── stream_server.py   # HTTP streaming server (aiohttp)
│   ├── screen_capture.py  # screen capture (adb + ffmpeg)
│   ├── ffmpeg_pipe.py     # FFmpeg pipeline helpers
│   └── recorder.py        # recording to MP4
├── Dockerfile
├── requirements.txt
└── README.md

Contact

Maintained by juzoni-oc. For hosted device streaming, cloud screen-cast services or custom device-API integrations, contact qtphone.com.

License

MIT