Using a jailbroken iPad to record a PC screen works surprisingly well
I love Minecraft, and sometimes I create something I want to make a video out of. I’ve used Fraps for this in the past, but quite frankly, Fraps is horrible. Its audio recording capability is extremely bad compared to other programs using the same input, it causes the FPS to drop more than it should, and it doesn’t compress video. Quite frankly, I’m tired of it. Too tired of it to bother anymore.
Today however I got an idea. My iPad is quite capable of recording its own screen using Display Recorder (jailbroken iPads only) and quite capable of displaying my computer screen using Splashtop. I honestly didn’t think such an amazingly peculiar setup would actually give a good result, but in my opinion, it did. A 13-minute video turned out to be 500MB, versus roughly 12GB for something similar with Fraps. Audio was also much better, and even with sending the screen wirelessly via Splashtop, the computer side of things had no lag. Obviously you lose a bit of quality in the Splashtop process, get some lag from the wireless transfer, and you’re limited to the iPad’s resolution, but that doesn’t stop me from declaring Fraps dead and this the new master.
Fraps is also rather expensive, and so is a lot of similar software. Some of these apps will also only record games, require a somewhat beefy computer, and so on. The Splashtop/Display Recorder setup works great for what it is, and it just shows what you can use an iPad for if you just try things that you wouldn’t think would work in theory.
The video above is what came out of my recording session. A bit got cut off the beginning because I didn’t allow the recording to fully start before opening my mouth, but other than that it’s better than I could ever have hoped for considering it’s using an app that only runs on a hacked “toy” to record a PC screen it’s receiving wirelessly from a computer.
