quicktime_video_hack

1. What is this?

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

Check out my presentation

See a demo on YouTube

This repository contains all the code you will need to grab and record video and audio from your iPhone or iPad without needing one of these expensive MacOS X computers :-D It probably does something similar to what QuickTime and com.apple.cmio.iOSScreenCaptureAssistant are doing on MacOS. Currently you can use it to dump a h264 file and a wave file or mirror your device in a desktop window. Transcoding it to anything else is very easy since I used Gstreamer to render the AV data.

2. Installation

1. Install Gstreamer and LibUSB with brew or apt depending on your platform. On MacOS run brew install libusb and brew install pkg-config and brew install gstreamer gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-ugly
2. Download the latest release and run it or clone the repo and execute go run main.go

3. Usage

Q.uickTime V.ideo H.ack (qvh) v0.3-beta

Usage:
  qvh devices [-v]
  qvh activate [--udid=<udid>] [-v]
  qvh record <h264file> <wavfile> [-v] [--udid=<udid>]
  qvh gstreamer [--pipeline=<pipeline>] [--examples] [-v]
  qvh --version | version


Options:
  -h --help       Show this screen.
  -v              Enable verbose mode (debug logging).
  --version       Show version.
  --udid=<udid>   UDID of the device. If not specified, the first found device will be used automatically.

The commands work as following:
        devices         lists iOS devices attached to this host and tells you if video streaming was activated for them
        activate        enables the video streaming config for the device specified by --udid
        record          will start video&audio recording. Video will be saved in a raw h264 file playable by VLC. 
                     Audio will be saved in a uncompressed wav file. Run like: "qvh record /home/yourname/out.h264 /home/yourname/out.wav"

        gstreamer   If no additional param is provided, qvh will open a new window and push AV data to gstreamer.
                                If "qvh gstreamer --examples" is provided, qvh will print some common gstreamer pipeline examples.
                                If --pipeline is provided, qvh will use the provided gstreamer pipeline instead of 
                                displaying audio and video in a window. 

3. Technical Docs/ Roll your own implementation

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