How to capture video of Android programmatically without external hardware?

4
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I know this question has been asked many times here and many other places but none of the answers provided satisfies my requirement. Basically, I want to be able to perform screen video recording of my app at 30 fps in realtime without external hardware, similar to Fraps except it is on Android. My app is a Unity Android app and I have found a plugin (AV Pro Movie Capture) that does exactly what I want but it only works on Windows.

There are others that said it is not possible to "Fraps" Android devices directly in real-time with just an installed app or Android SDK functions (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/89821-How-do-i-quot-Fraps-quot-my-game-on-iOS-or-Android , 2nd post) and instead suggested using external hardware setup such as diverting video signal from Android device to a PC monitor. I had a feeling this is the case because screen video recording is processor intensive and an Android device is obviously not as fast as a PC in its spec.

If the above statement is true, does anyone have any solid technical answers/evidence to it? My boss has been asking for this feature many times and is not convinced when I told him it is very difficult to "Fraps" an Android device due to processor speed; his reason is that "it is as simple as feeding the output video display signals back to camera, how computationally intensive can it be?" I need something more to convince him otherwise.

Update: I found this free SDK SeeMeGaming by LunarG and it is very close to what I to do on an Android device ( http://www.lunarg.com/see-me-gaming/ ) . Has anyone here used it?

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androidunity3dvideo-capture
Your app was built with Unity3D, why don't you run it in editor player and do screen casting there? – Kay
I cannot do that. The end result is that it must be a feature available to the end-users to record currently played scene and allow them to freely access and/or share it, so it has to be on the Android device itself. – ksming

2 Answers

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Android Stack Exchange Answer

Using Unity's camera to snapshot the scene: Would require that you stitch the png's together using your own code. No idea how fast this actually runs.

Another random post with a few other apps

The last time I tried to do something similar most posts indicated that I would need a rooted device. Several apps at the time also required rooted devices, so I gave up on that plan and stuck with dumping Unity's main camera screens to a folder.