One More Tap » Jailbreak

Screencasting Using Display Recorder for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch [Jailbreak Only]

xcool — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 02:49:31 +0000

True story: I finally did it and jailbroken one of my iOS devices. The victim happens to be my faithful first-generation iPad. I did it simply because I wanted to be able to do screencasting on my device.

You see, I have always been a fan of Street Fighter. I downloaded both Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter IV Volt the moment it was released. If you want a fighting game for your iOS device, the Street Fighter series is the one to get.

With the debut of Street Fighter IV Volt, online multiplayer became possible. I’ve spent countless hours before bed playing with people from all over the world. One thing I loved about the game is the ability to save replays of your favorite matches. Some of these replays were epic moments during game play. I hit the maximum amount of 20 replays quickly enough that I find it difficult to let go most of these replays.

At first, I thought of using a digital camera to record the screen while the replay plays. Not a very good idea. Truth be told, I’d even tried using my iPhone 4 to record the game from my iPhone 3GS. I’m a person who looks for perfection and has an eye for detail, and both options created videos that were lousy in quality or simply mediocre.

I did some research and found Display Recorder by famed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich fitting my needs. There are other solutions out there, but Display Recorder gets the most attention. However, nothing’s perfect in this world, and so is Display Recorder. It does screencasting perfectly, but it doesn’t record any audio.

No worries there. We can always improvise. And I’ll tell you how in a while.

So, I set my sights on jailbreaking my iPad since its not my day-to-day device. I’m not going to detail the process of jailbreaking here, simply because jailbreaking is not the focus of this site and you can easily find hundreds if not thousands of articles on the internet regarding jailbreaking with a simple search on Google.

Once the iPad has been successfully jailbroken, I downloaded Display Recorder after paying the small fee of just $4.99.

Before you start screencasting using your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, it’s a great idea to check out Display Recorder’s settings. The default settings are okay, but I’d change it anyways. Display Recorder’s settings are available under the Settings app. Refer to the attached screenshot if you’d like to copy my settings. Here’s the tricky part. The framerate is set using a slider, but there’s no indication of what value is being set. It defaults to 20 frames per second (fps) but I thought I’d set mine to 24 fps. This value is stored in a file located at /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.booleanmagic.displayrecorder.plist. Look for DRFramesPerSecond and change the value to 24.

By default, Display Recorder can be activated by pressing and holding the Sleep button. A prompt will appear to confirm if you want to start recording. Feel free to try recording some screencasts.

Earlier, I mentioned about improvising on Display Recorder’s inability to record audio. My Unibody MacBook Pro came with an audio jack that functions as both audio in and out. What I did was to connect one end of an auxiliary cable into my iPad’s audio jack, and the other into my MacBook Pro’s audio in jack. Here’s a selection of auxiliary cables on Amazon if you need one to get one for yourself. Next, I launch QuickTime Player and voila! Just be sure that the volume from your iPad is not set to too soft, otherwise you’ll have a hard time later.

Now that I have everything setup accordingly, I am ready to record screencasts on my iPad. For Street Fighter IV Volt’s replays, I recorded the replays from start til end. At the same time, audio from the iPad is routed to my MacBook Pro and recorded as well. I end up having two streams of recording on my computer. One for audio and the other being the video.

It’s a matter of dubbing them and synchronizing the audio using any video editing software that you have. Mac users like myself may want to use iMovie that came pre-installed. I’m not a Windows user, but I heard that Windows Movie Maker fits the bill.

Display Recorder isn’t all perfect, as I’ve mentioned above. During my recording sessions, I observed lags and some flickering. But the resulting video came out okay with a little bit of lag, but minus those flickering. I’m perfectly fine with this, since it’s tonnes better than recording by holding another camera or iPhone.

What do you do with the video that you recorded? Well, I uploaded mine onto YouTube, of course!

iPhone 3G Unlock Tool Released

xcool — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:20:38 +0000

Yes, you read that right! If you happen to be one of those lucky Lukes with the iPhone 3G (and if you just got yours from Christmas), then read on. The iPhone Dev team has released the unlocking tool (code name: yellowsn0w) that shall permit the iPhone 3G to work with any carrier.

If you have been following this development, note that contrary to what was posted earlier, the tool does indeed work with the latest firmware version, 2.2, which contains the latest radio baseband.

Things to note before attempting to modify your iPhone 3G:

the unlock tool only works with baseband 02.28.00, which is provided by the recently released firmware version 2.2
the unlock tool is designed as a daemon (background process), thus there’s no GUI
version 0.9.4 has been released which relieves the need for a one-minute delay upon resetting the iPhone
you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone in order to run the unlock tool

Head over to both the iPhone Dev‘s site for further reading, and yellowsn0w to download the tool.

If you like, check out this step-by-step instructions, as posted by the guys over at Crunch Gear.

Hack at your own risk!

P/S: No, this will not work on your iPod touch 2G

Various iTerms

xcool — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:38:28 +0000

A lot of people seems to be confused with the terms used throughout the iPhone/iPod touch sphere. Terms like unlocked, unlocking, jailbreak can be harder to understand than history lessons.

Here’s a short summary of what each term means:

Unlocked unit means that your iPhone or iPhone 3G will work with any Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) from any service provider in the world. Your phone might either be factory unlocked, carrier unlocked or user unlocked.

Factory unlocked units work as soon as you pop in any SIM from any carrier. This is the best unit to get. Example of carriers/countries that provide factory unlocked iPhone 3Gs are SingTel (Singapore), 3 (Hong Kong), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) and Vodafone (New Zealand) to name a few.

Carried unlocked iPhones are units that have been unlocked by the carrier thru the process of entering a ‘unlock code’. Once this is done, the locked (originally) iPhones become unlocked and shall now work with any SIM from any carrier. Updating the firmware does not ‘relock’ the iPhone.

User unlocked iPhones are units that have been unlocked using software exploitation to allow operation with various service providers. Google for this term and you shall find more information which I would not cover here.

Last but not least is the term jailbreaking. Apple only allows signed code to run on the iPhone and iPod touch. There are many reasons behind this, such as ensuring that your iPhone only runs applications that are certified not to be harmful. However, there are various third-party software out there, which would not receive approval from Apple. Jailbreaking your iPhone/iPod touch would allow these apps to run as if there were signed code.

Check out this link if you’d like more explanation on other terms used.

More Than Just a Jailbreak

xcool — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:38:15 +0000

chaofan (via iPod touch Fans) posted a very good take on the current iPod touch jailbreaking landscape: there’s no jailbreak for the iPod touch 2G devices, yet.

Instead, he suggests that everyone just go ahead and use the iPod touch, as it is. Play your music, watch your videos. Download a game of two and see what makes the latest iPod touch ‘the funnest iPod ever‘. An iTunes account opens up all the possibilities of the above, for free.

Heck, if you are a workout freak, get the Nike + iPod Sport Kit and check out your runs!

iPhone 2.2 Jailbreak – Go Get Yours

xcool — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:18:38 +0000

Just within days after iPhone firmware 2.2 was released, the team at iPhone dev has done it again. They have just released both the PwnageTool and QuickPwn for iPhones and first generation iPod touch devices.

The team further detailed that the 2.2 update also upgraded the baseband. Thus, to achieve a jailbreak and also ensure that future soft-unlock options are available, users would need to use the PwnageTool to create a custom IPSW file that preserves the 2.1 baseband but also installs the software functionality of the 2.2 update.

The QuickPwn tool is targetted at users of first generation (1G) iPod touch, iPhone 2G, factory unlocked iPhone 3G and also users of iPhone 3G who does not want to soft-unlock their phones. Owners of the second generation (2G) iPod touch is quite unfortunate this time around as neither PwnageTool nor QuickPwn works for them. The dev team is currently forcused on 3G unlock and shall look into working on the new iPod touch soon.

Check out the dev team’s posting for complete instructions. Remember to be careful and make sure that you’re picking the right options.

Those who just want the Installer.app on the 2G or 3G iPhones, or doesn’t want to go through the jailbreak process may check out Pushers, from the RiP Dev team. It currently works with 2.2. Pusher is a safer jailbreak alternative, it doesn’t open the system partition when writing information.

One More Tap » Jailbreak

Screencasting Using Display Recorder for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch [Jailbreak Only]

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