Black Screens, Freezes and Player Crashes

Four separate faults reach us as the same sentence, and they have nothing in common beyond how they look from a distance. A screen that has switched itself off is not a crash, and a player that has quit to the desktop is not a content problem. Telling them apart takes a minute.

Which of the four you have

Dark screen, player still running. The device is awake and the player is loaded, it is drawing nothing.
The player has gone. You see the desktop, a launcher or a home screen where it used to be: a crash or a start-up failure.
A frozen picture. One image, or one frame of video, held indefinitely.
The panel is off, or on another input. No player involved.

One test tells you which. Try to open the player’s status window:

On a recent Android or Windows player, press i on a connected keyboard.
On an LG webOS panel, press the remote’s yellow button, then choose Status from the Action bar.

If the window appears, the player is alive and you have a content fault, not a crash. Its Log Messages are usually the plainest statement of what is wrong. See Reading the Player Status Window.

If nothing appears, the player is not running, so go to “The player never started” below.

Rule out the screen itself first

More often the answer than everything below put together. Check these four before touching easyCMS.

The panel’s own on/off timer. Commercial screens carry a power schedule in their remote-control menu, nothing to do with easyCMS. A screen going dark at the same time each day is almost always this.
The input source. After a cleaning crew, a power cut or a visiting laptop, a panel often comes back on a different input.
The cable. Swap the HDMI lead and try another port before suspecting software.
Energy saving and sleep. Eco modes, screensavers and sleep timers blank a screen while the player runs underneath. On Windows, turn all three off for the signage user.

A nightly power-off can also be arranged from easyCMS, as a scheduled Command event the player carries out at a fixed time. If a screen goes dark at a predictable hour and the panel does not explain it, look for a command event in that display’s schedule and ask us to change the timing.

The player never started

After a power cut the device can be running perfectly with nothing on it. The fix depends on the platform:

Android. Turn on the player’s own autostart option. On an unattended site, also set the player as the device’s home app. See Android Player Setup.
Windows. The installer sets the player to launch at logon, so the missing piece is nearly always automatic logon: the machine is sitting at the sign-in screen. See Windows Player Setup.
LG webOS. The panel’s own start-up settings launch the app, set when the player was installed. See LG webOS Player Setup.

If your model does not match the guide, tell us the make and model rather than guessing.

It ran for days and then crashed

Low-cost Android boxes and screens with the player built in have very little memory to spare. Run for long enough and the device reclaims memory from the player, which looks like a crash after hours or days of faultless playback, on no obvious trigger. No setting cures it. You can only lower the demand:

Fewer webpage and embedded widgets, which are the heaviest things a player renders.
Smaller, shorter videos.
1920 × 1080 layouts rather than 4K.
Fewer items playing at once. See Webpages and Embedded HTML on a Display and Videos Will Not Play or Stutter.

The Windows player starts a watchdog alongside itself that restarts it if it crashes or stops responding, leave it enabled. It is good at catching a player that has closed, poor at catching one frozen but technically still alive. We cannot promise the same on other platforms, so where crashes recur the dependable answer is a scheduled nightly restart, which we can arrange.

Freezes and downloads that never finish

A device with no storage left cannot finish a download, or write what it needs to keep playing. That shows as a frozen picture, a layout that never appears, or both.

Make the player throw away its local copies and fetch them again:

Open Displays.
Open the screen’s row menu and choose Edit.
Go to the Advanced tab.
Tick Clear Cached Data.
Click Save.

It clears down at the next check-in.

Watch out Never stop the player and delete files from its library folder by hand. The player manages that folder itself.

Display Is Online but Content Never Changes covers reading download progress.

If it is showing the easyCMS logo, stop here

A logo or splash screen is not a black screen. The player is healthy and has nothing it is allowed to play, a scheduling problem with a different fix. Go to The Screen Only Shows the easyCMS Logo instead.

Still dark

Send the display name, the platform, a photo of the status window if you can open it, and what changed before it went dark, through the support request form.