Rotate display
Four values: 0°, 90°, 180°, 270°. Available on every kind of screen.
Choose to match how the panel was physically mounted rather than what your content is. A portrait display mounted with its controls at the bottom usually wants 90°, and one mounted the other way wants 270°. Getting it wrong is common, and costs another round trip to the device.
Resolution
Framebuffer width and framebuffer height, on Raspberry Pi based screens, force the resolution the player renders at.
Leave both empty unless you have a reason. Empty means the player takes the resolution the display reports, which is right almost always. Set them when a display reports something wrong, or when it reports nothing at all and the picture comes out at some default you did not want.
Overscan
A black border around your content, with the picture not quite reaching the edges of the panel, is overscan. It comes from the display rather than from Screenly, and it is a legacy of television rather than a fault.
On Raspberry Pi based screens, Disable overscan is the control, and its wording is worth reading twice: setting it to On disables overscan, which is what removes the border. That is the setting almost everyone wants.
If a border remains, set Disable overscan to Off to hand control back, then use Overscan scale to trim the picture until it fits.
The border often shows on images and web pages but not on video, because video reaches the display by a different route. A screen where only the video looks right still has an overscan problem.
Object fit
On Screenly Anywhere screens only, Object fit decides what happens when content and display disagree about shape.
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Original size | No scaling at all. May overflow the display, or leave space around itself |
| Scale down | Shrinks content that is too big, leaves smaller content alone |
| Scale up | Grows content to fit |
| Fill | Covers the whole display, cropping whatever does not fit |
| Stretch | Covers the whole display by distorting the aspect ratio |
Fill is the usual choice for photography and video, where losing a little from the edges matters less than a black band. Scale down is the safer choice for anything with text or a layout, where cropping loses meaning.
Stretch is almost never right. It makes everything slightly wrong in a way people notice without being able to say why.
The fix that beats all five is producing content at the display’s own aspect ratio, at which point the setting stops mattering.