quicktime_video_hack

Release 0.6

• qvh without Gstreamer is finally stable on MacOSX. I ran it for 16 hours straight on parallel devices and it worked flawlessly.
• before a 1.0 Release I need to see if Gstreamer is stable enough and maybe fix or switch to ffmpeg
• Linux support needs to be improved. It works but it is hard to get going currently.
• Create an issue if you miss anything

1. What is this?

This is an Operating System indepedent implementation for Quicktime Screensharing for iOS devices :-)

Check out my presentation

See me talk about it at GoWayFest

See a demo on YouTube

This repository contains all the code you will need to grab and record video and audio from one or more iPhone(s) or iPad(s) without needing one of these expensive MacOS X computers or the hard to use QuickTime Player :-D

• You can record video and audio as raw h264 and wave audio in the Apple demonstration mode (Device shows 9:41am, full battery and no cellphone carrier in the status bar)
• Also you can just grab device audio as wave, ogg or mp3 without the Apple demonstration mode now 🎉
• You can use custom Gstreamer Pipelines to transcode the AV data into whatever you like

2. Installation

2.1 Mac OSX

1. On MacOS run brew install libusb pkg-config gstreamer gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-ugly
2. To just run: Download the latest release and run it
3. To develop: Clone the repo and execute go run main.go (need to install golang of course)

2.2 Linux

1. Run with Docker: the Docker files are here. There is one for just building and one for running.

2. If you want to build/run locally then copy paste the dependencies from this Dockerfile and install with apt.

3. Git clone the repo and start hacking or download the latest release and run the binary :-D

3. Usage

• For just displaying the screen run qvh gstreamer and it will work.
• For just getting raw media output without Gstreamer involved use qvh record out.h264 out.wav or qvh audio out.wav --wav for audio only
• For troubleshooting run qvh diagnostics metrics.csv --dump=binary.bin which will persist logs to a file, dump all usb transfers and gather metrics.
• See qvh gstreamer --examples for transcoding media or streaming.
• For creating mp3 or ogg in audio only mode see qvh audio out.mp3 --mp3 and qvh audio out.ogg --ogg

4. Technical Docs/ Roll your own implementation

QVH probably does something similar to what QuickTime and com.apple.cmio.iOSScreenCaptureAssistant are doing on MacOS. I have written some documentation here doc/technical_documentation.md So if you are just interested in the protocol or if you want to implement this in a different programming language than golang, read the docs. Also I have extracted binary dumps of all messages for writing unit tests and re-develop this in your preferred language in a test driven style.

I have given up on windows support :-) Port to Windows (I don't know why, but still people use Windows nowadays) Did not find a way to do it