Screen orientation and external HDMI displays

This article covers mounting a screen in portrait, and using an Android phone or tablet to drive a large panel over HDMI.

Portrait and landscape

Every platform supports both orientations, and nothing is locked. A vertically mounted panel shows portrait content the right way up, and a device in a ceiling or under-shelf bracket rotates to match.

A display is mounted, and a mount is whatever the site allows. A tall panel beside a doorway is portrait, and a stick under a shelf is inverted.

Setting the orientation

STQRY Signage follows the device rather than overriding it, so set the orientation on the device or the screen:

Lock the rotation on anything with an accelerometer. An unlocked tablet will rotate if somebody knocks it, and nobody may notice until the next visit.

Designing content for portrait

Build your media at the screen's actual aspect ratio. A 1080×1920 image on a portrait screen fills it properly, while a 1920×1080 image gets cropped hard to the middle third.

By default an image fills the screen and crops. If you need the whole image visible, letterboxed with black bars, turn on Don't transform on the media item in your Content Library. See Supported media formats.

Mixing orientations in one playlist means some items will crop badly on one of them. If you run both portrait and landscape screens, build separate playlists.

Driving an external HDMI display from an Android device

An Android phone or tablet with HDMI output can play signage on a large external panel. USB-C DisplayPort alt mode works the same way. The device's own screen shows a status view while the panel plays. This is how a handheld device drives passenger screens on a vehicle, and how a tablet in a cupboard drives a panel on the wall.

What happens when you plug in

The app moves signage onto the external panel automatically. The device's own screen switches to a status view showing:

• Where signage is currently playing

• The region
• The display's activation key, masked
• The display's URL, with the key redacted

Unplug the cable and signage returns to the device's own screen.

The app waits about 400 milliseconds after a cable event before it reacts. So for one cable insertion, the correct symptom is roughly 400 milliseconds of dark panel followed by exactly one reload.

Note: If the playlist restarts more than once from a single cable insertion, that's not expected. Let us know, along with the device and cable you're using.

The reset gesture moves

On a device driving an external panel, the touch long-press reset moves to the device's own status screen, because the panel has no touch input. It works anywhere on that screen, including right at the edges.

The long press produces a short vibration when it registers, so you can tell a hold on an apparently unresponsive black screen has been received.

Multiple screens from one device

One device drives one external panel, and there's no way to drive two different screens with different content. For two screens, use two display records and two devices.

Good to know

• A panel driven this way keeps playing when the device goes to its launcher, sleeps, or is put down. A passenger screen must not go dark because somebody pressed Home on the tablet.

• The activation key is masked and the URL redacted on the status screen, because the device's screen on a bus or a boat is not a private surface.
• Fire TV Sticks and Android TV boxes never use this path. A stick's television is its own display, so there's no external panel to move to.
• The app waits 400 milliseconds because a panel renegotiating its HDMI connection sends a burst of events rather than one.
• Samsung DeX is untested. If DeX won't hand the display over to the app, the answer is likely a provisioning step on the device. Talk to us if you're planning a DeX deployment.

Troubleshooting

Content is rotated 90 degrees. Set the rotation on the device or the panel, not in Signage. If the device rotation is already correct and the picture is still sideways, the app is out of date. Older versions pinned some platforms to landscape.

Images are cropped badly. The media's aspect ratio doesn't match the screen's. Rebuild the media at the screen's ratio, or turn on Don't transform to letterbox it instead.

The screen rotates on its own. Lock the device's rotation.

The external panel is black but the app says it's playing. Check the cable and the panel's input selection first. If the panel is live and the app believes it's playing, tell us. There's a known blind spot where the app can't detect that a panel it thinks it owns has gone away, and a report helps.

The panel reloads several times when I plug the cable in. This isn't expected. Tell us which device and cable.

Next steps

• Supported media formats — sizing content for the screen.

• Set up an Android TV device or Android tablet
• Troubleshooting a display