Scrcpy is a free and open source utility that lets you mirror the display of an Android device on a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer so that you can interact with your mobile apps on your laptop or desktop.

Up until recently that meant whatever was on your phone's screen would show up on your PC screen. But the developer recently added a virtual display option that lets you mirror a virtual screen rather than whatever's currently on your Android device's display. This lets you, among other things, interact with one app on your PC and another on your phone.

The virtual display debuted in scrcpy v3.0, which was released in November. But there have been a few small updates since then, and the latest version at time of publication is scrcpy v3.1, which improves on the virtual display feature by adding support for keeping apps running on a virtual display active on your mobile device even after you close the virtual display on your PC. It does this by moving the app from your virtual display to your primary display, and helps prevent data loss if you lose the connection between your phone and PC.

The latest version also brings better support for gamepads, improved support for AV1 video encoding and decoding, and other bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Note that while the biggest change in scrcpy versions 3.0 or later is support for virtual displays, they're not enabled by default. You'll have to add them manually. For example, starting scrcpy with the command "scrcpy –new-display" will start the app on a PC with a virtual Android display set to the same resolution and pixel density as your Android device.

You can also set the resolution and pixel density manually. Here are some examples of how to do that:

scrcpy –new-display=1920×1080scrcpy –new-display=1920×1080/420 # force 420 dpiscrcpy –new-display # use the main display size and densityscrcpy –new-display=/240 # use the main display size and 240 dpi

You can find more details in the scrcpy v3.0 release notes, although I'd recommend installing the latest release if you want to try the application yourself.

In addition to allowing you to mirror your Android device's display (or virtual display) on a computer, scrcpy allows you to crate screen recordings, copy and paste between your devices, capture video from your camera on a PC (instead of mirroring your device's display), and even use your Android device's camera as a webcam (although this feature currently only works on Linux).

You can find more information at the scrcpy GitHub page.

via Ubuntu Handbook

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