[HN Gopher] Scrcpy 2.2 adds Android camera mirroring
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Scrcpy 2.2 adds Android camera mirroring
        
       Author : rom1v
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2023-11-04 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | arcanemachiner wrote:
       | Such a fine piece of software.
        
         | SushiHippie wrote:
         | Absolutely, it was a blast to use this in school to control the
         | smartboards where you could enable adb on them. And it worked
         | so well, I could write on the smartboard with my touchscreen
         | laptop.
        
       | Scene_Cast2 wrote:
       | Android 14 was originally supposed to add webcam functionality
       | (IIRC it added an "act as a webcam" option when plugging the
       | phone in via USB in the Betas). The speculation is that although
       | it was removed from the final release, it might be added in a
       | December update.
        
         | mcny wrote:
         | Does that mean effectively it will only be available for
         | devices that release with Android 15 (ignoring pixels)?
         | 
         | Edit: I have a OnePlus nord n30 5G that released with Android
         | 13. Is it eligible for this feature? Iirc OnePlus said it will
         | only give this budget phone one (1) version upgrade so
         | wondering if a December feature drop counts as a second
         | upgrade... :(
         | 
         | Maybe won't even matter if this requires specialized hardware
         | :(
        
           | mhitza wrote:
           | Maybe by that time the'll be a LineageOS rom for your phone
           | so you aren't tied to OnePlus limited support policy
        
           | Scene_Cast2 wrote:
           | My source: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/178m
           | xsi/what_h...
           | 
           | Make of that what you will.
        
       | jampekka wrote:
       | Scrpy is awesome and one of those rare pieces of software that
       | has a clear and powerful thing to do and does it so well you get
       | to forget it's even there. Essentially you get the feeling that
       | this is how it should work.
       | 
       | But at the same time I find it a bit sad example of how much
       | effort to and how much corner case fiddling such conceptually
       | very simple tasks have to take.
       | 
       | Caricatyring here, but it is essentially just blitting pixels
       | over a network connection. I don't think it should be that hard a
       | task with a more reasonable underlying stack. Plan 9 (and
       | probably many other sadly forgotten systems) showed how something
       | like scrcpy can fall out more or less automatically from a better
       | designed system.
       | 
       | Maybe I'm underestimating some fundamental complications, but I
       | can't help but feel something has gone very wrong with how we do
       | things with computers. Maybe something like worse is better on
       | piles of previous worse is better.
        
         | jayd16 wrote:
         | I think you're taking for granted just how performance
         | intensive this is. For example, "Just a blit" is a full screen
         | draw worth of pixel operations on a hardware platform that is
         | known to have pixel draw at a premium.
        
           | actionfromafar wrote:
           | I don't understand this comment. It's a marvel of course how
           | far we have come, but what today is so intensive?
           | 
           | The (old!) Apple iPad _cable_ runs BSD Unix and does real
           | time video _encoding_.
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | Correct, you're violently agreeing, _they embed a whole
             | *NIX computer in the cable to make it happen_.
             | 
             | They were replying to someone saying why does everyone make
             | it so complicated.
             | 
             | Refer to my comment for the math on why its intensive
        
               | actionfromafar wrote:
               | Are you violently agreeing with me now? :-)
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | Quick math on blitting pixels: - lets assume 1920x1080: 2073600
         | pixels.
         | 
         | - 4 bytes a pixel = 2073600 * 4 = 8294400 = 8.2 MB / frame.
         | 
         | - 8.2 MB frame * 60 fps = 480 MB/sec = 3.2 gbps = an order of
         | magnitude higher than even your average techie's internet
         | entire pipe. That's for 1080p. The market baseline for
         | resolution, 4K, 4x's that. 240 fps (market baseline for gamers)
         | adds another 4x. ~50 gbps
         | 
         | As long as you're willing to accept intellectually that
         | _sometimes_ there will be video-like content played, where more
         | than 10% of the pixels change in a frame, you now _need_ to
         | assume some form of compression algorithm is applied on every
         | frame, i.e. do video encoding.
        
       | clumsysmurf wrote:
       | Would love to see official Mac binaries along with the Windows
       | ones, that are up to date, etc.
        
         | TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
         | https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/scrcpy
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-11-04 23:00 UTC)