Player apps

What an app adds#

• It remembers the screen across a power cut, so a 3am outage does not leave a pairing code in a shop window.
• It starts itself at boot, with nothing to click.
• Kiosk — no address bar, no menus, nothing a passer-by can get out of.
• It keeps the display awake, which every operating system otherwise refuses to do for an idle machine.
• It reloads rather than ever showing an error page to the public.
• It tells the platform which version is running.

The packages#

Installing#

1. 1
   Install and launch

   The app opens straight to a pairing code — the same six characters the browser shows. There is nothing to configure and no address to type.

2. 2
   Pair it

   Scan the QR, or enter the code in Link TV on the Screens page. Exactly as in Your first screen.

3. 3
   Leave it

   It starts at boot from now on and needs nobody. What an operator needs at the screen is in one menu: right-click anywhere on the screen, or press Esc.

The menu#

Every app shows the same menu, and so does a television's own browser at /tv. On a remote, hold OK for two seconds; on a touch screen, press and hold; on a computer, right-click or press Esc. It closes by itself after 30 seconds.

• What the screen is — its name and location, the player's version and the app's, the network, and the screen's address on it.
• Diagnostics — the player's instrument panel on this screen until the player restarts, whatever the screen's own setting in the dashboard.
• Restart the player — reloads it; with no network it comes back on what it has stored.
• Unlink this screen — asks first. The screen shows a pairing code; in the dashboard it stays, offline, until a device is linked to it again.
• Settings and Close the app — on a computer, and closing on Android too. Closing asks first.

On a computer the tray icon and Ctrl+Shift+M keep the app's own menu as well: Show diagnostics on every monitor (Ctrl+Shift+D), Full screen to get a movable window while setting a box up, About (Ctrl+Shift+I) and Quit (Ctrl+Shift+Q).

Several monitors on one computer#

The first time the app starts with two or more monitors, each of them asks: Use this monitor for ScreenRoll, or No, I use it for work. ScreenRoll plays full screen on the ones you choose — each its own screen in the dashboard, which is how a video wall is modelled — and leaves the others alone: its windows stay above everything only on its own monitors, and never take the keyboard from somebody working.

Change it in Settings → Monitors, one box for each. A monitor connected later is never used until it is ticked there. An LED controller is different: it shows a rectangle of the desktop at a size no monitor has. For those, Settings → Display → Exact rectangles gives the window exactly that rectangle, and Pixel-exact keeps Windows from scaling it.