If you want to mirror your Android phone on a Linux desktop, you sooner or later end up at scrcpy. The free program from Genymobile shows the phone screen in a window and lets you control it with your mouse and keyboard, no root required. Version 5.0 has been out since October 5, and it brings a feature many people have been waiting for: hardware decoding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Until now, the CPU unpacked the entire video stream from the phone. With scrcpy 5.0, the GPU takes over, on Linux via VA-API. The change only affects the computer side, not the phone. The scrcpy 5.0 release notes<\/a> promise ten times less CPU load. OMG! Ubuntu<\/a> has covered the release as well, and there is a thread about it in the r\/Android subreddit on Reddit<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hardware decoding is active out of the box, no extra switch needed. scrcpy picks the first suitable decoder itself and falls back to software otherwise. If you want to step in, the documentation<\/a> points you to Windows users get native ARM64 builds for the first time. That does not matter on Linux, where the graphics side counts. On my machine, scrcpy 5.0 just arrived as an update on my Arch notebook, a quick --hwdec<\/code>, for example with auto<\/code>, vaapi<\/code> or disabled<\/code>. There are also a few smaller changes: audio capture mode now grabs all sources, ANDROID_SERIAL<\/code> works in OTG mode, and Shift and AltGr no longer get lost in UHID mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\nsudo pacman -Syu<\/code> is all it takes. If you have not installed the program yet, grab the scrcpy package from Arch Linux<\/a> with sudo pacman -S scrcpy<\/code>. The source code lives in the scrcpy GitHub repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n