scrcpy 2.0 Adds Audio Forwarding, H265 And AV1 Codec Support
scrcpy, a tool to display control Android devices from the desktop, has been updated to version 2.0, receiving a major new feature: audio forwarding. But that's not all – this release also adds H265 and AV1 video codec support, along with other changes.
This is a free and open source application that can be used to display, record and control Android devices connected via USB or wirelessly, from a macOS, Windows or Linux desktop. The application focuses on performance and quality, offering 30~60 FPS with a resolution of 1920x1080 or more, and low latency.
Audio forwarding, one of the most requested features, has landed in scrcpy with the latest 2.0 release. This is enabled by default for devices running Android 11 and higher. For Android 10 and older, audio cannot be captured, so this feature is disabled.
It's important to note that for Android 12 and newer, audio forwarding works without any tweaks. For Android 11 though, you'll need to make sure that the device screen is unlocked when starting scrcpy.
Now, when recording your Android 11 or newer device from the desktop using scrcpy, audio is also recorded. If you don't want to forward audio, disable it by passing the --no-audio command line flag.
There are also various command line flags in this release to modify how audio forwarding works. By default, the buffer size is set to 50 ms, but you can change this using --audio-buffer. It's also possible to change the codec and bitrate (defaulting to Opus at 128Kbps), using --audio-codec and --audio-bit-rate, with the possible codecs being opus, aac and raw (uncompressed PCM 16-bit LE). List the audio encoders available for your device using --list-encoders, then specify the encoder to use with --audio-encoder.
Besides audio forwarding, other changes in scrcpy 2.0:
- Add H265 and AV1 video codec support
- Add
--list-displaysand--list-encoders - Fix clicks on Chrome when
--forward-on-clicksis enabled - Retry on spurious encoder error
- Make
--turn-screen-offwork on all displays - Restore resizing workaround for Windows
- Upgrade platform-tools to 34.0.1 (adb) in Windows releases
- Upgrade FFmpeg to 6.0 in Windows releases (and use a minimal build)
- Upgrade SDL to 2.26.4 in Windows releases
You might also like: Helper GUI For scrcpy, The Android Desktop Display And Remote Control Tool
Download / install scrcpy
scrcpy works on Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS. The application GitHub releases page has binaries for Microsoft Windows only. On Linux, you can install it from your distribution's repositories or a third-party repository, if available, or build it from source. E.g. the tool is available in the Arch Linux, Debian (and Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) official repositories, however, on Linux distributions like Ubuntu, it won't be updated to the latest version until a new Ubuntu release is out.
You may want to check out my older (but updated today) article on installing scrcpy on Fedora or Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, etc. The article includes instructions for building scrcpy from source (and a Copr repository for Fedora).
