Key Takeaways
- Scrcpy 3.0 introduces virtual display support for mirroring secondary screens to your PC.
- The update includes pre-compiled builds for macOS and Linux, enhancing accessibility.
- The app features a command-line interface, making it challenging for non-technical users.
Scrcpy is one of our favorite screen mirroring tools for Android, enabling you to wirelessly mirror your phone’s screen to your PC. It is not the only tool that can do this, with Microsoft Phone Link offering the same experience in a more polished package. However, scrcpy continues to shine with its robust feature set, offering support for gamepads, audio forwarding, and more. The latest release takes it even further by adding virtual display support.
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Scrcpy 3.0 is a big release that packs several features and enhancements. The biggest highlight is virtual display support, which allows you to create and mirror a secondary display to your PC instead of the main screen. This way, you can use your phone while also mirroring an app to your PC and using it.
As noted by scrcpy’s developer in the GitHub commit #5370, most Android devices will display a secondary launcher activity on the virtual display. If there’s no launcher available, a black screen will appear. In such cases, you must launch an Android app manually using scrcpy’s command line.
Another subtle yet significant update is the addition of pre-compiled builds for macOS and Linux being available for download, which was not the case earlier.
You can find the full scrcpy v3.0 release notes below:
scrcpy v3.0
Changes since v2.7
- Add virtual display feature
- Launch Android app on start
- Add OpenGL filters
- Add –capture-orientation to replace –lock-video-orientation (which was broken on Android 14)
- Fix –crop on Android 14
- Handle virtual display rotation
- Add –angle to apply a custom rotation
- Add –screen-off-timeout
- Adapt “turn screen off” for Android 15
- Add shortcut Ctrl+Shift+click-and-move for horizontal tilt
- Add shortcut MOD+Shift+r to reset video capture/encoding
- Forward Alt and Super with SDK Keyboard
- Add more details to –list-encoders output
- Add option to disable virtual display system decorations
- Fix –time-limit overflow on Windows
- Fix “does not match caller’s uid 2000” error
- Accept filenames containing ‘:’ when recording
- Disable mouse by default if no video playback
- Rename –display-buffer to –video-buffer
- Listen to display changed events
- Adapt server debugging for Android >= 11
- Upgrade FFmpeg to 7.1
- Upgrade SDL to 2.30.9
- Upgrade platform-tools (adb) to 35.0.2
- Build releases via GitHub Actions
- Release static builds for Linux and macOS
- Various technical fixes
scrcpy needs to ditch its command line interface
Microsoft Phone Link should be good enough to meet the screen mirroring requirements of most Android users with a Windows PC. But if you want even more features or are using a Mac, scrcpy is one of your best options to mirror your Android phone’s display easily.
You can download scrcpy 3.0 from the Assets section of its GitHub page. Do note that scrcpy is unlike other screen mirroring tools for Android and uses a command-line interface. This makes the app difficult to use for non-technical users, but you will find plenty of help and instructions on the GitHub page for all the important commands.
