Preparing images and video for a sign

Pixel sizes

A file in the wrong shape still plays. The player fits it without stretching and adds black bars. There is also a fill setting that crops the edges. Here is what each looks like:

Those are the cases people trip on. A slide made for 16:9 shows thin bars on the 10.1 inch. A landscape slide on a portrait screen fills under a third of it, and it looks like a mistake. Always make slides in the shape of the mounted screen.

Margins and text size

Keep words and logos about 50 pixels from the edge. Make your smallest text at least 60 pixels tall on a 1080 x 1920 slide. On a 15.6 inch display, that reads from about 13 feet at 30 feet per inch, and on a 23.8 inch display from about 20 feet. The size guide has the full table.

Use light text on dark or dark text on light, with strong contrast. Four to eight slides is plenty. If the times or the menu change, the slides have to change too, so put a reminder on someone's calendar.

File names set the order

Everything goes in one folder at the top of a microSD card or USB stick, named exactly IMD_SIGNAGE. Files inside a subfolder are not played.

IMD_SIGNAGE/
  01-welcome.jpg
  02-breakfast-6-to-10.png
  03-open-late_15s.jpg      shown for 15 seconds
  04-lobby-video.mp4

Start each name with a number so the order is clear. Pictures show for 10 seconds unless you say otherwise. To change one, end its name with an underscore, the number of seconds and the letter s. After the last file, it starts again from the first.

A card comes formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, and both work. FAT32 limits a single file to 4 GiB, which only matters for long, high-quality video. Split it, or use exFAT.

Our free card tool does all of this in your browser, and nothing is uploaded. The content checker looks over files you already have. If you would rather start from something, the downloads page has sample slide packs, labeled as sample artwork.

Exporting video

Aim for an MP4 with H.264 video at 30 fps in the same pixel size as the screen. Most editors offer that as an export preset. Be careful with video straight from a phone: many phones record HEVC (H.265) by default, and H.265 support depends on the unit. Re-export it to H.264.

If you have FFmpeg, this turns most files into a 1920 x 1080 H.264 MP4 at 30 fps, with black bars if the shape differs and no sound. For portrait, swap 1920 and 1080. We ran this command on a test clip and checked the output format on a computer, not on a unit.

ffmpeg -i input.mov \
  -vf "scale=1920:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1920:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2,fps=30,format=yuv420p" \
  -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -crf 20 -preset slow -an output.mp4

Android's media documentation requires decoders for H.264 Baseline and Main profiles and does not list High. If a High profile file shows black, try the same command with -profile:v main.

Size is simple arithmetic. A one minute clip at 8 megabits per second is about 60 MB. Video is what fills the unit's memory, so keep clips short. Pictures hardly matter. If a show is too large for internal memory, it plays from the card without being copied, and then the card has to stay in. The player always keeps 200 MB of internal storage free.

Sound

Videos play silently unless sound is turned on in the settings. Most signs should stay silent. A screen that repeats the same audio all day gets unplugged by staff.

Loading the card

1. Put the card or stick in the screen. Within a few seconds it switches to the new content.
2. Leave it for at least a minute, longer with large videos, while the screen copies the show to its own memory.
3. Take the card out, or leave it in. If it stays in, the card always wins, even when the screen also gets content over the network.

If you pull the card too soon, the screen goes back to the previous show. Put it back and wait a little longer. To change the show later, edit the files on your computer and put the card back. Only changed files are copied.

If something looks wrong

Still stuck? Contact us with a photo of the screen and a list of the files on the card.

Questions