Handy mobile tool scrcpy app gains rotation locking and improved quality on smaller displays in its latest release.
If you’re not familiar with scrcpy it’s a small app that lets you mirror your Android phone screen on your desktop via a USB cable (or wirelessly using android adb). You can interact with your device and all of its apps using a regular mouse/touchpad and keyboard.
What’s particularly great about Scrcpy is that it is open source, cross platform (works on Windows, macOS and Linux), and doesn’t require any sort of root access. You just plug and play.
Scrcpy 1.13 introduces the ability lock video orientation from the command line; adds shortcuts to rotate the display without physically rotating your phone; and is able to mirror secondary displays in Samsung DeX style set-ups.
When interacting with your phone via scrcpy you can now press:
ctrl+←to rotate display 90° counterclockwisectrl+→to rotate display 90° clockwise
You can also pass the --lock-video-orientation flag at runtime to lock the orientation in one of four ways:
scrcpy --lock-video-orientation 0is natural orientationscrcpy --lock-video-orientation 1is 90° counterclockwisescrcpy --lock-video-orientation 2is 180°scrcpy --lock-video-orientation 3is 90° clockwise
The inclusion of support for trilinear filtering (which you can see in the hero screenshot at the top of this article) improves the quality of the mirrored screen when it is smaller than the display’s actual resolution. This means no more pixelated or glitchy-looking screens when resizing the window to a smaller size.
You can learn more about scrcpy 1.13 on GitHub, where you’ll also find downloads for various systems including Windows.
Want to install scrcpy on Ubuntu? Just run sudo snap install scrcpy from a terminal window, or visit the Snap store listing:
Remember that scrcpy is a command-line tool; you will not see a shortcut for it in the applications screen.