Teams Phone Screen Capture Tool

If you’re ever putting together documentation, training material or blog posts on Teams Phones, you don’t want to be in a situation where you are taking photos of the screen of the phone with a camera. Instead it’s always better to get a crisp and clear pixel perfect screen shot. Fortunately, Teams phone devices allow you to do this, however, it’s not very well documented. In this blog post I’m going to take you through the process of taking screen captures on Microsoft Teams phones and also introduce you to a tool that I created for taking screen shots and animated GIFs of your Teams Phone devices.

 

Teams Phone Screen Capture Tool

 

The Teams Phone Screen Capture Tool was created to both make screen captures easier to take and also to create fully marked up animated GIFs of your Teams Phone Screen for documentation, blog posts, training material, etc.

Tool Features:

• Capture jpeg images of static screen images.
• Capture animated GIF screen captures
• Edit the length of captured GIFs
• Resize captured GIFs
• Markup captured GIFs with rectangles or circle shapes in multiple colours
• Currently supports Poly and Yealink devices. AudioCodes is not supported yet due to their current implementation methodology.

Version 1.01:

• Updated to support for non-Teams CCX and VVX phones
• Support for PowerShell Version 7

Version 1.00: Initial Release

Download from Github

 

 

How to Enable the Screen Capture Feature on Teams Phones

 

The screen capture feature is enabled on each of the Teams phone brands in a slightly different way. I have created a walk through for how it’s done on each device brand.

 

Screen Capture with Poly Teams Phones

 

Step 1: Navigate to Settings > Device Settings > Debug > Screen Capture

Step 2: Navigate to Settings > Device Settings > Admin Only > (Enter Password) > Network Configuration > Web User Interface

Note: The default password is "456".

Step 3: Open the Teams Phone Screen Capture Tool in PowerShell:

IPAddress: Enter the IP Address of the Poly Phone.

Phone Type: Poly

Password: <“456” is the Poly default>

Click the “Show Screen Button”

The tool will then try to connect with the details given. Once connected you should see the screen in real time:

Now you can Save a Screenshot or record an animated GIF.

 

Screen Capture with Yealink Teams Phones

Step 1: Navigate to  Settings > Device Settings > Admin > (Enter Password) > Debug > Screen Capture > Enable

 

Note: The default password is "admin".

Step 2: Open the Teams Phone Screen Capture Tool in PowerShell:

IPAddress: Enter the IP Address of the Yealink Phone

Phone Type: Yealink

Password: <“admin” is the Yealink default>

Click the “Show Screen Button”

The tool will then try to connect with the details given. Once connected you should see the screen in real time:

Now you can Save a Screenshot or record an animated GIF.

  

Screen Capture with AudioCodes Teams Phones

The AudioCodes Teams phones don’t offer the same web-based access to their screen captures taken on a device. For this reason the tool does not support them at the moment. If you do want to take a screen capture on an AudioCodes phone you can but it’s a bit more work. You’ll need an SSH client (Putty will do) and a TFTP client in order to pull down a copy of the screen shot off the phone.

Here are the steps required:

Step 1: Turn on the Screen Capture setting in the phone:  Settings > Device Settings > Device Administratoion > (Enter Password) > Debugging > Screen Capture

Step 2: Access the phone via SSH

Note: The default username/password is "admin"/"admin".

Step 3: Run a TFTP client on your PC

Step 4: Run the commands from the SSH command line:

screencap /sdcard/screen_cap.png

curl -T /sdcard/screen_cap.png tftp://host_ip

 

These commands will make the phone take a screen capture which is saved onto the phone. Then the second command sends the screen capture to your TFTP server which you need to have running and accepting inbound file transfers.

This is not the most elegant of solutions and I hope that AudioCodes adds a web-based method for accessing the screen shots in the future.

GIF Editing Studio

After you have finished capturing the GIF a new window will be displayed that allows you to edit the GIF. The screen looks like this:

If you would like to mark up the GIF with coloured circles or rectangles to highlight something on the screen, you do this by first selecting the frame you want the shape to appear on, then select the "Markup Shape" and "Markup Colour" values, and then you simply click and drag on the image to place the shape where you want it. This will make the shape appear on the particular frame you had selected. If you would like to extend the amount of time it is on the screen for, you select the shape in the "Markup Shapes" list and edit the StartFrame and/or EndFrame column value(s). 

You can also edit the dimensions, location, colour and shape after selecting the shape in the list. Once you have made the changes you want to the selected shape you click the "Update Shape" button and it will save the changes. If you no longer want a shape that you had previously added you select the shape from the list and click the "Delete Shape" button to remove it. Note: when you select a shape in the "Markup Shapes" list the first frame that it appears on will be shown in the image box and the shape will be highlighted in light blue so you know which shape you've selected (if you un-select the shape in the list it's real colour will be displayed).

You can change the length of the animated GIF by changing the "Start Frame" and "End Frame" values underneath the image on the left hand side of the interface. The start and end frames selected will be reflected in the final GIF that is exported from the tool. The "Image Size" value allow you to change the height of the image when you change the height the width will be automatically changed to match. If you are making a long animated GIF then it can be useful to reduce the size of the output in order to keep the file size down on the exported GIF. By default the GIF will loop for an infinite amount of time if you would like it to only loop once you un-check the "Infinite Loop" checkbox.

Teams Admin Portal - Device Setting

You can control the Screen Capture setting that each of the phone brands devices need turned on in order to get access the screen capture images. The setting is found in the Devices > IP Phones > Configuration Profiles (tab) > + Add > Screen Capture:

This allows you to push this setting out to phones if that is how you want to do it. Keep in mind though that the Web User Interface setting required for Poly phones to support screen capturing is not available from the Admin Portal.

The Wrap Up

There you go, a new tool for your screen capturing pleasure. Enjoy!

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