The show and the screen are different shapes

You built the menu board for the counter screen last month and it has been fine. Now there is a second screen, a tall one on a pillar by the door, and you have pointed it at the same show. The board has come up upright and readable, in a band across the middle, with a thick black stripe above it and another below.

Nothing is cut off and nothing is squashed. It is simply using about a third of a panel you paid to hang.

A show has a shape and a panel has a frame, and when the two disagree the show is fitted inside the frame rather than stretched or cropped. Digital signage shapes are 16:9 landscape and 9:16 portrait, chosen when the show is made. The leftover space is the black bars, and which way those bars run tells you which half of the pair is wrong.

Which way do the bars run?

One glance from in front of the panel answers it.

What you see on the panel	What it means	The frame it is in
Black bars down the left and right, board is a narrow column	A portrait show (9:16)	A landscape frame
Black bars across the top and bottom, board is a wide band	A landscape show (16:9)	A portrait frame
No bars, edge to edge	The shapes match	Nothing to fix

The app uses those same two phrases, Bars at the sides and Bars top and bottom, marked against each screen in the publish and tune pickers, so the wall and the app agree.

One symptom looks related and is not. A board lying on its side, with headings running up the wall, or one that is the right way round but upside down, is the screen’s rotation rather than a shape mismatch, and it has its own four-way diagnosis in which of the four settings is wrong. A shape mismatch always produces an upright, readable board, so if you can read it comfortably and it is merely small, you are in the right lesson. What the mismatch costs in actual pixels, for every mount and shape pairing, is tabulated in the digital signage size guide.

Why does it not just stretch to fit?

Because both alternatives are worse than bars.

Stretching distorts everything it touches. A logo goes oval, a face goes wide, and a price that was set at a careful weight comes out condensed. Cropping means software deciding which third of your board to throw away, and it has no way of knowing that the third it dropped was the prices.

So a mismatch is allowed to be ugly rather than wrong: it costs you screen area and never the board. A landscape menu on a portrait pillar is a correct menu that is too small, which is a fair decision for a week while you build the right one.

Should I turn the screen, or change the show?

One question picks the exit, and it is not about software.

Is the content right for the way the panel is hung? A menu of five priced lines read from four metres suits a tall frame. A two-column timetable or a wide photograph does not. Answer that, and the fix follows:

• The show is already the shape the content wants, and only the panel is hung the wrong way. Turn the screen. Ten seconds, nothing in the show changes.
• The panel is hung the way the wall needs, and the show was composed for the other shape. Change the show. That is a genuine redesign.

Get this the wrong way round and you do an afternoon of design work to solve a problem that was a wall bracket.

How do I rotate the screen instead?

The cheap exit, and it applies if the TV is already turned, or you are willing to turn it.

1. Open Screens and pick the screen.
2. On its Device card, find How it is mounted.
3. Choose the quarter turn that matches the TV’s top edge as it hangs now.

Rotation changes the frame the player draws into and never touches a slide, so no work is at risk. It reaches the player in a few seconds, with no remote and no walk over to the set.

The limit is physical. If the TV is bolted up the normal way and the show is portrait, changing this setting gives you a sideways picture rather than a fitted one, because the frame follows the panel and the mount setting together.

How do I change the show’s shape?

The real exit, and it is work. Be honest about that before you start.

1. Open the show in the editor and find the shape badge in the top bar. It reads Landscape (16:9) or Portrait (9:16).
2. Click it. The menu is headed Shape of this show and lists both.
3. Pick the other one. For a shape this deck has never been, the row says it will build it from this deck and then leave you to fix it up.
4. Go through every slide. The toast is explicit: everything moved to fit the new shape, so check each slide before you publish.

On a phone that badge lives in the editor’s wide layout, so use Make a portrait version from the show’s menu on Shows instead: the same pass, forked into a second show.

What the pass actually does is re-compose rather than rotate: it rescales the type so it keeps its apparent size, re-places the boxes into a vertical stack, then separates anything that ends up overlapping. It has to re-compose because positions convert for free while type sizes, being a percentage of the slide’s width, do not. The detail of composing for the narrow shape, and the type sizes it actually needs, is building a show designed for portrait.

The shape you leave is parked, not overwritten: the picker says your other shape is kept and switching back returns it exactly as you left it, so the first flip is the only expensive one. A show on air keeps playing throughout, with the confirmation naming the screens or channels involved first.

When is neither fix the right answer?

When one deck has to fill both shapes by itself. There are no per-screen layout variants here: a show is authored in one shape, and every screen airing it gets that shape fitted into its own frame. A mixed estate means two shows, kept in step by hand. If that is the job, buy a platform built around responsive per-screen layouts, where one deck carries a layout per panel shape and the player picks. That is a real reason to look elsewhere.

The reflow is a draft, not a board. Expect to cut lines rather than nudge them, because a narrower frame holds fewer items at a size anyone can read. Treat that as a rule of thumb and check it against your own deck.

Neither control fixes the other’s fault. Rotating a screen cannot make a landscape deck fill a portrait panel, and changing a show’s shape cannot right a sideways mount.

How do you avoid this next time?

Three habits, cheapest first.

Answer the shape when the show is created. A brand new show asks Shape of this show on the empty board and will not let you add anything until you answer, then Start building. On an empty deck there is nothing to re-place, so the choice is free.

If you need both, keep them as two shows. Make a portrait version forks a copy and leaves the original alone, so each is designed for its own panel and neither is a compromise flipped back and forth.

Start from a template. The templates gallery carries official boards in both shapes, and each board’s page names the shape it was authored at, so you can begin from one already built for the way your panel hangs.

Go and look at the panel, note which way the bars run, and change the one setting it points at. On a free screen a ChannelOS banner sits along the bottom and about every two minutes opens into a full ChannelOS slide for roughly 30 seconds, naming what ChannelOS is and the channelos.tv address, then folds back. Any paid plan removes both. The black bars are not part of that: they are geometry, and they go when the shapes agree.