scrcpy audio not working — what actually works (2026)

April 27, 2026 · ~6 min read

The five reasons scrcpy audio is silent

If you ran scrcpy and the device window opened but no sound reached OBS, it is almost always one of these. Walk them in order — early ones are cheap to check.

1. You're on scrcpy 1.x

Audio forwarding landed in scrcpy 2.0 (May 2023). Anything older does video only.

scrcpy --version
# expected: scrcpy 2.x or later

If you installed via your Linux distro repository, check the version — Debian stable can lag well behind. winget upgrade Genymobile.scrcpy on Windows or grab the latest release directly.

2. The phone is on Android 10 or older

Android exposed the MediaProjection audio capture API only in Android 11 (API 30). On Android 10 and below, scrcpy logs a warning at startup and skips audio:

WARN: Audio capture is not supported before Android 11

If your phone is older, no scrcpy flag will fix this. Update Android, change phone, or route audio over Bluetooth/aux into the PC instead.

3. You're capturing the wrong audio source

scrcpy 2.x supports several sources, and the default has changed across releases:

If you launched scrcpy with --audio-source=mic by accident, you will hear a slightly muffled version of your room and zero game audio. Force the right source explicitly:

scrcpy --audio-source=output

4. The app marks its audio as protected

Android lets apps flag their audio output as DRM-protected via FLAG_AUDIO_PLAYBACK_CAPTURE. When set, MediaProjection silently returns nothing. scrcpy can't override this — the call from inside the app is what blocks the capture.

Common offenders:

• Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music — paid streaming audio
• Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ — DRM-protected video soundtracks
• Some Korean and Japanese mobile games that ship with anti-cheat / anti-mirroring SDKs

If you only ever stream gameplay, this rarely bites you — most games do not set the flag. But if you tested with Spotify in the background, the silent capture can look like scrcpy is broken when the issue is the app.

5. The audio is forwarding fine, but OBS is listening to the wrong device

This is the most common failure once you've ruled out 1–4. scrcpy plays the audio through the PC's default output. OBS's "Desktop Audio" source then picks it up — unless your default output is a different device than the one OBS is monitoring.

Check on Windows:

1. Right-click the speaker icon → Sound settings → Volume mixer.
2. Find the scrcpy entry while it's running. Note which output it routes to.
3. In OBS, open Settings → Audio → Desktop Audio and pick the same device.

On macOS this requires a virtual audio driver (BlackHole, Loopback). On Linux, route via PulseAudio's pactl load-module module-loopback.

Diagnosis flow, condensed

scrcpy --version             <-- step 1: must be 2.x
adb shell getprop ro.build.version.release
                             <-- step 2: must be 11 or higher
scrcpy --audio-source=output <-- step 3: pick the right source
test with a non-DRM app      <-- step 4: confirm capture is allowed
check OBS audio device       <-- step 5: route correctly

When scrcpy still won't cooperate

If you've walked all five and still have silence (or you're tired of doing this every session), there are three options:

Option A — Bundled GUI tools

Tools that wrap scrcpy with a UI handle the audio routing for you. We're biased — we make ChargeCast — but the honest pitch is that a one-click tool with a built-in 3-channel mixer (game audio, PC audio, mic) skips most of the failure modes above. It is Windows-only, $4.99/month with a 7-day trial. Worth it if you stream weekly; not worth it if this is a one-off project.

Option B — Old-school analog routing

3.5 mm jack out of the phone (or a USB-C-to-3.5 mm adapter) into your PC's line-in. Zero software complexity, but you give up the digital signal and have to re-balance the levels on every track.

Option C — Mix on the device

Record gameplay on the phone with the system recorder, transfer the file, edit later. Not "live streaming" anymore but works for YouTube uploads.

What about DroidCam, AirDroid, or scrcpy alternatives?

Short version: DroidCam treats the phone as a webcam, not a screen mirror — its audio goes through the mic capture, so game audio fights with your voice. AirDroid and similar Wi-Fi mirrors send video without audio at all on most plans, and the latency is worse. None of them solve the underlying Android 11+ / DRM constraints; they just hide them differently.

scrcpy is still the right base tool. The question is only whether you wire it up yourself or use a wrapper.