With Android 16 you can record what you do on an external monitor

With the integrated screen recorder function from Android, the screen of an Android phone can be easily recorded. However, if you connect your Android phone to an external monitor, there is no easy way to record what happens on the external display. This is because the Android screen recorder currently does not support the content of external displays, but this will be changed in the upcoming Android 16 update.

When I connected my pixel telephone with Android 16 Beta 3 to an external monitor, I found that the Android screen recorder dialog box now had a third option in the dropdown menu: “Run HDMI screen”. When I separated the phone from the external monitor, the options returned to the well -known “recording of an app” and “pick up this screen”.

The option to record an HDMI screen is not available on my pixel, on which the latest stable version of Android 15 is executed. This means that this function is new to Android 16. I don't know exactly what preview version of Android 16 added this option.

With the “HDMI screen” HDMI “option, it enabled me to record what happened on the external monitor, separated from the integrated display of the phone. The resulting screen recording was encoded and stored in the same way as standard phone screen recordings. However, there was a small difference: The internal ID, which assigned Android to the external monitor Added.

First of all, the option for selecting the external monitor was not available if an app mirroring of third-party providers was requested to record the screen. The option was also not there when I tried to throw the screen with the integrated cast tiles from Android. With Android 16, the integrated screen writer can basically only record what happens to external monitors, which is unhappy, since there are some apps that could benefit from this function.

Hopefully Google will expand this ability in a future publication by Android. Google is working on a new desktop mode experience called Desktop View. It would be useful if apps can record or record what we do on external monitors.

This function extends a less well-known ability of the Android 15 version of last year: the ability to create a screenshot of external display. Since Android 15, the operating system has saved separate image files for each display connected to an Android device. As with screen recordings, Android finds the ID of the external display for the file name of the screenshot. There is no easy way to trigger the Gemini assistant or the circle to search for an external advertisement. So I am not sure whether similar restrictions regarding apps and screenshots from third -party providers apply.