One of the most frustrating things for me as a developer and as a
presenter, is when I need to get my iOS device onto my screen and mirror it.
Now, I sometimes just wanna see the app that I'm developing in real
time, or if I'm presenting, I wanna show the thing that I'm developing
and I just wanna hold up my phone.
So today I'm gonna break down four different ways for you to screen mirror
your iOS device to your Windows machine.
So you.
Whenever you are ready and all the way from free options to paid
options and even some hardware that will never fail on you, so tune in.
Hey everyone.
I'm James and I've been a longtime iOS and Android, a Windows
developer, a Mac developer.
And like I said, one of the most frustrating things for me is when
I'm doing a presentation or what I'm developing and I just wanna
see my device on the screen.
Well, today I'm gonna show you four different ways of
actually breaking it all down.
Some of them are software that you install on your Windows machine.
Some of them are hardware that you can use with different software that's out there.
Uh, and I've been using a variety of them for a long time.
So let's go ahead and get.
All right.
The first one is one of my favorite applications that I've used for, I
don't know, a decade at this point, probably, which is Visor Visors, one
of my favorite applications originally developed to screener Android devices,
but it now also does iOS devices too.
So I'm gonna walk you through exactly how this works.
So one thing to know about Visor is that there's two parts to it.
Uh, one is the desktop application that you need, uh, and if you're
on iOS, there is an iOS visor app that you download on Android.
It'll automatically side loaded.
So this is nice if you are a developer and especially using
these devices, you can just.
Plug in your device and go.
Uh, this one works over u sb so you do need to plug your device
into your Windows machine.
And there are two different skews, both normal and pro.
I have the pro, which is nice, uh, has all sorts of options in here.
And the fee is pretty low.
So down here, anywhere between two 50 for a month, $10 for a year, or like me, I
have the lifetime, uh, available to me.
So the first thing that you wanna do is download the software.
Boom.
You're good to go.
And I'm gonna bring it up.
So Visor gives you a lot of different options, and you can see here that
there's all sorts of different things, um, outlined for iOS devices.
Uh, and then of course some different drivers that you may need to install, like
the Apple Mobile device support in there.
Uh, so it kind of tells you everything you need.
So there are some, some things there.
Like I said, this one also does Android, so you would also get Android on there.
All right.
The first thing you're need to do is install the Visor application.
So if you go into the App store, type for Visor, here it is, right
here, and you'll see, you can just download it and open it up.
Now when you have visor, Installed here.
What you're gonna do is plug in your iOS device to your Windows machine via
u SB cable, and it'll automatically show up inside of the Visor app on Windows.
Now this is gonna, of course, need some permissions for camera and a bunch of
other things that's gonna prompt you.
Uh, basically what it'll do is use the new broadcasting functionality built
into iOS to screen mirror your device.
Now you can't be, uh, plugging your device in screen mirroring
here, which is the fourth option that I'm gonna show you later.
So I'm gonna go ahead and unplug it now.
Now what I'm gonna go ahead and do is simply take my u SB cable,
which is down here, and I'm gonna plug it into my device.
Now what we see in the Visor desktop app is that the iOS device is there,
and I'm gonna go ahead and hit.
Now here, this is gonna say, do I wanna start Visor?
There's error broadcasting over here, and that's because I need to
actually start the broadcast on iOS.
There's a big button that you might have saw earlier, which is a broadcast
button that's gonna bring up the broadcast screen and I'm gonna say
start broadcast and it does a countdown.
Now, once it does that, my iOS device is ready to broadcast.
So here it's gonna go ahead and walk me through everything.
And there it is.
There's my iOS device right here.
Actually doing a screen mirror of the visor application itself.
So here is that visor application.
Now it's being screen mirrored and we can see this little red.here.
And if I tap on that I can see that it's uh, it's actually is broadcasting.
So this is nice cuz it's own self-contained window.
And of course if I go ahead and swipe around, we can see my iOS device coming
in and it is really, really fast.
So I'd give it props there, uh, in.
There are some different settings that you have so you can, um, see
when it's, uh, devices connected.
You can show a preview when the screenshot is taken.
Uh, you can pin the title bar, navigation bar.
There's some mouse calibration on there to track a desktop movements and different
image quality, and you can even have an F L V output of the device as well.
The other cool part is that there's actually a record screen button and
a take screenshot button as well, so you can go ahead and get that.
So that's Visor.
Uh, it's one of my favorite options cuz not only is it gonna do iOS, but
it's also gonna do Android as well.
So that is one really, really cool option that you may want to take a look at.
And the nice thing is that it does work over u sb so you don't have to
worry about any wifi or any V VPN n or anything getting in your way.
As long as you have a u SB cable, you are good to go.
All right.
The next one on my list is one that works specifically over wifi.
This is the original way that I did screen mirroring before some of
these newer technologies came out.
Specifically, if you think about how you can broadcast your iOS device or
your Mac machine via airplay to your Apple tv, for example, you can use
that same technology to broadcast and send your iOS device to your Windows
machine with an application called.
Now this is an application from Air Squirrels.
It's been out for a long, long time, and it's in its fourth iteration
Now, this again, is a paid product.
There is a free trial, so you can see here it's 1999 and I've purchased it
many a times, and this is an application that you download specifically onto your.
Windows or Mac machine.
Now what's great is it does work with ba, basically just about
anything, uh, which is really cool.
But again, it works over wifi so no cables or anything is involved there either.
So let's get into it.
So I have it installed and we can see it right here.
Here is the reflector floor app and there's a lot of options.
So there's record all, there's some settings here.
So I can go into preferences.
The nice thing here is that I can say, oh, it's gonna show up as my system name.
Uh, I can see the connection, so what do I want the resolution to be?
So if I'm on a slower like internet or something's going on there,
I can go ahead and do that.
There's some security options.
So you can have a password or a one-time screen code, um, um, or just
an on-screen code that displays, there's some full screen options available.
There's recording options available too.
Uh, there's all sorts of network interface options available.
And there's a bunch of other things that are crazy in here too, so you can
see, you can put on airplay, Google cast, miracast, all that stuff as well.
So lots of nice options in here.
I'm just gonna use the default.
So what I'm gonna do over here is I'm gonna bring up my, um, iOS
device again, and what I'm gonna go ahead and do is pull down from the.
And I'm gonna go ahead and hit this little screen mirror button.
Now what we see on here is that there's two different devices that came up.
The first one that we see on the bottom is my Apple TV called Living Room, and
the second one is my desktop device.
So I'm gonna go ahead and tap on that desktop device option there.
And what this will do is try to connect to the Reflector four application.
Now it's unable to connect because I'm screen mirroring.
So lemme go ahead and unplug.
And tap it one more time over there.
So I'm gonna unplug this, which again is my final option that I'm gonna sneak in
there and I'm gonna go ahead and connect up automatically to my desktop device.
Alright.
So since iOS has that restriction basically of being
able to only mirror like one.
Way at a time.
Now that we have that, we can see I'm connected automatically to the
Reflector four application and we can see it reflected right over here.
I can hide it, I can show it, I can go in, I can bring it full screen, I can toggle
the sizes on it, which is kind of nice.
Uh, there too.
I can also, for example, uh, tap on the settings here and there's
all sorts of different options.
So it automatically detected that it's an iPhone 11, but I
can change the different options.
I can look at the default sizes.
I can say it's always on top of it's full screen if I want to
force rotation or not on there.
And again, just like we would see earlier, It's pretty smooth scrolling.
I'll also note down here there is a screenshot option and additionally
a record button too, but it is pretty buttery smooth as you can
see there, which is pretty nice.
All right, so once you have that up and running, that's all you need.
You're totally good to go.
And now you have your iOS device with no wires in between
reflected onto Windows machine.
All right.
Second to last option here, and actually the cheapest option
currently available of free.
That's right.
Absolutely.
100% free is an option that I saw for David Orton now use in several
presentations and videos that he did.
It's something that you may not think of, but it's actually
really easy to get up and.
And that clever technique is actually using a messaging application like Teams
or Zoom or Google Meet or Slack that gives you an option on the mobile device to
actually share your device into a meeting.
This is pretty clever.
I didn't really think of it.
It's maybe not the end all be all of ways of doing this, but you can easily,
for example, create a free account.
So here I have the, just the browser view over here of Teams,
and I've installed teams on.
Uh, device.
So here it is.
Uh, and what's great about this is that I can go in and just simply join a call.
So create a call with yourself.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and mute myself over here.
And then on my device, I'm gonna go ahead and join that as well.
And I'm gonna say join here.
Now when you do this, you're gonna join and now we have a few options.
And that option here is to share and you'll specifically see share screen.
Now when you do this, this is gonna use the same exact broadcast
technology that Visor used to actually do the screen mirroring over there.
Now the difference is that, uh, visor was going local right through
the USB cable to get into that feed and output through the app.
When you're using teams, you're obviously going through the internet,
so there's gonna be a round, you know, a round that it needs to
go to go up and then down over.
So this is the same screen that basically wouldn't let me broadcast because, uh,
I'm already broadcasting, uh, over here.
So I'm gonna go ahead and unplug that now.
And we're gonna go ahead and remove this from the screen.
I'm just gonna hit start broadcast over here.
And this is gonna do a countdown just like it did on Visor and
then just like, My device is now directly inside of the team's call.
I can go ahead and bring up things like Pfizer again, we can see it.
I can go out and go around and see, here's my team's call that's going on here.
Now this one is a little bit slower.
You can see a little bit here just because it is doing a screen mirror.
So in this instance, you know you're not gonna be showing off
the performance and the screen and all the other stuff like that.
But you now have a window that you can drag and drop anywhere on your
screen and you can get it available.
So this is something if you just need it in a pinch, right?
And you don't have cables, you don't have anything like that, you don't have.
Software installed on your machine, you don't have time to do that.
You can easily hop into a teams call to get it going, and of course it's gonna
work with anything that enables you to share your screen on your device like Zoom
or Slack or, or meet or things like that.
And of course, you can just easily go to teams microsoft.com, and then boom,
create your teams account and you're all set up and you're good to go.
And this works really, really great.
Okay.
Last but not least, the way that I've actually been doing screen mirror for this
entire video, uh, is something that you may not think of doing with your iOS, uh,
device to actually get it on the screen.
Uh, however, it does work really good in a pinch.
Uh, if you don't want to go through any wireless, any U S B or anything like
that, well I guess you do need a usb.
But if you don't have those cables around, uh, there is a way of capturing
the output of your iOS device.
H D M I.
You'll need two pieces of hardware.
First and foremost is the H D M I adapter for your iOS device.
That's a lightning.
And then the other one is a capture card.
So for example, the CAM link like I have here from El Gato or any of the
different capture devices that could be internal, external, or anything like this.
And there's a bunch of these out on the internet.
I'll link to these official ones cause I think they work super duper good.
Uh, but the gist of it is like this.
The first thing that you'll wanna do is take your Elto card
and plug in an H D M I cable.
Then what you'll want to do is take the H D M I adapter, plug in an H D M I
over there, and then what you're gonna do is plug that into your device, boo.
Just like that.
Now with this setup, basically you plug via U S B, this adapter
into your device automatically.
So if you're on a Windows machine, plug it in.
If you're on a desktop like I am right here, plug it in and you're good to go.
Now I'm gonna show you how to set this.
In O B S, but you can also use the El gato software, other capturing devices,
software that comes in to just use it as a, uh, as a webcam, for example.
You can do that too.
So what I'm gonna do now is head over and we're gonna go ahead
and capture that really quick.
All right.
So the very first thing that we're gonna do is take that u sb
and plug it in to your machine.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and do that.
All right, we're good to go.
Now, on my iOS device, it actually told me it was installing a device driver, I
guess, from the actual little adapter.
So that may take a few seconds there.
So you're gonna let that go ahead.
And then what you'll see is a little blue icon in the top left of your iOS device.
Now what you're gonna do is inside of O B s go into the new
and say video capture device.
And here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say Cam, link iOS.
and then it's gonna bring up a screen.
So we have a bunch of cameras, a bunch of other things on here.
I'm gonna select my cam, link 4k.
Now this is gonna show me what my device looks like.
I'm gonna hit okay, but notice here that it has this black background on it.
And if I move this over, you can see that I'm behind it.
So that's not super ideal.
But if you wanted to, uh, what you can do is hold down the alt, uh, button here
and then actually trim that video down.
So here, I'm just gonna trim this source down just like this.
There we go.
Move that up.
And then move it over.
You can then resize it.
You can do anything you want.
And the cool part about using obs in this scenario is that if you want to, you can
actually use this as a virtual camera.
So the whole thing would be a virtual camera here.
And the nice thing of course, is that it is H D M I, so it is pretty
butter smooth, which is really, really nice at the end of the day.
So you get all of that built in and that capabil.
Uh, you can capture the audio out from it as well.
So you can see here the audio, so you might wanna mute that if you're
doing some screen capture, but this is one of my favorite ways of just
setting up scenes inside of o bs.
The window's always gonna be there when I plug it in, and I'm totally good to go.
So there you have it really, really easy.
Probably the easiest way, the most minimal setup way, uh, of doing this.
But of course, you're gonna have to have obs open on a screen.
So again, not the most ideal scenario here, but you could, you
know, set the resolution of o.
Uh, to be, uh, instead of 1920 by 10 80, 10 80 by 1920, or the resolution of iOS.
And the other cool part is that you could take this and then you could
say, uh, preview scaling, or windowed projector, and you can actually
take this into a little window too.
So that's something that you could do at the same time.
So you can use some different powers and just have that floating around.
So that's one of my favorite features.
You can do that, and again, you can set it up to be a different scale.
. Anyways, there you go.
Using H D M I via the adapter and everything that you need.
. All right.
And there you have it.
What's your favorite way of screen mirroring your iOS device
to Windows or to any of your other devices that are out there?
Did I miss something?
I think there's a lot of great software solutions out there today that help you
get there, and the cool part is many of these solutions also work for Android too.
I think Android's a little bit easier cause you've been able to do it forever.
But for iOS, the options have come a long.
Let me know in the comments below if one of these four are the option that
you are going to use or already using, or if you're using something else.
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I really appreciate your time and hope that you enjoy this video is.
Until next time, thanks for watching.