Digital signage guides

How to put Digital Board on the screens you already have, how to run your own server, and how to build what plays on them. Pick your device below; each guide goes from unboxing to a screen showing your content.

Getting started

• What is digital signage?. How it works, what you can show, the hardware you need and what it costs.
• Open source digital signage. Own your data and pay no per-screen fees, on our cloud or your own server.
• Self-hosting Digital Board. Run the server yourself: Docker or a plain Linux install, backups and upgrades.

Use Digital Board

Start here

• Getting started. Create your account, open the player on a TV or in a browser tab, type its 6-digit code and put your first picture on the screen.
• Troubleshooting. A screen is offline, a pairing code is refused, new content does not appear, or the screen is black: what it means and what to do.

Screens

• Groups and video walls. Group screens so one playlist reaches them all, play them in step, and join panels into one big picture with a video wall.

Publish

• Head office. Play head office's playlist in every store, locked, with a slot each store fills with its own content.
• Layouts and zones. Split a screen into zones, decide which layout each screen uses, and put every item in the zone where it belongs.
• Content and playlists. Upload content, build a playlist, set how long each item shows, publish it, and put it on a screen or a group.
• Scheduling. Play a different playlist at set times, decide which schedule wins, and check what a screen will show before it does.
• Content requests. Share a link so people without an account can send you posters and videos, then approve or decline each one before it reaches a screen.

Create

• Templates. Turn a ready-made design (menu board, guest Wi-Fi, opening hours) into a widget for your playlists, and install more from the library.
• Widgets. Make a menu board, clock, weather or news ticker on the Widgets page, preview it, copy it for another screen and roll it back from History.
• QR codes. Make a QR code that counts scans, put it on a slide or a printed sign, and change where it goes without changing the code.
• Slides. Make your own slides with headlines, photos, prices, clocks and QR codes, then publish the deck as a playlist.
• Social feeds. Collect posts from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, Bluesky and Mastodon, approve them, and show them on a Social wall.
• Kiosk pages. Build a touchscreen page with big buttons, link pages together, and run it on a screen.

Automate

• Data Sources. Connect a Google Sheet, a typed table, the weather or a calendar once, and put the live values on your slides.
• Emergency feeds. Take over your screens automatically when the weather service or civil protection issues a warning for your area.
• Alerts. Tell your team in Slack, Teams, email, Telegram or PagerDuty when a screen goes offline, comes back, or shows a blank or frozen picture.
• Automation. Give a fire panel, a till or Zapier a secret web address that raises an alert, switches screens to a playlist or updates a table.
• Triggers. Let a fire alarm, a control panel or a button behind the counter put a playlist over your screens, even when the internet is down.

Insights

• Reports. See what your screens really played: totals, plays per day and per hour, top content and plays per screen.

Workspace

• Users and roles. Invite your team, choose who can change what, keep separate sites in separate workspaces, and require approval before anything goes live.
• White-label branding. Put your own name, logo and colours on the dashboard, the sign-in page and web player screens, and know what stays Digital Board.

Set up a screen

• Raspberry Pi. A browser kiosk or the native player on a Pi 3, 4 or 5.
• Android TV and Fire TV. The free player app on any Android TV box, Fire TV Stick or tablet, with kiosk mode.
• Fire TV Stick 4K Select and HD (Vega OS). The newer sticks that run Vega OS, not Android, and the player for them.
• Samsung TVs and signage displays. Tizen panels through the built-in URL Launcher or the player app.
• LG webOS Signage. The player app on LG webOS Signage panels, installed from your own server.
• Roku. What the Roku player plays, and what a Roku cannot do as a sign.
• BrightSign. One autorun.zip from your server, dual output, wall sync and panel power.
• Windows. Any Windows 10 or 11 PC as a player that stays up unattended.
• Mac, iPad and iPhone. The native macOS player, and the app for iPad and iPhone.
• ChromeOS. Chromeboxes and Chromebooks, managed through Google Admin or on their own.
• LED video walls. Driving a large LED wall at its native resolution.
• E-paper and ESP32 signs. Low-power signs with no browser on the device at all.
• Apple TV. Why Apple TV cannot run a sign, and what to use instead.

Not sure which device to buy? See Certified Hardware. Already have a server? Its download page lists every player it can hand out.

Build what plays

• Widgets, layouts and transitions. Split a screen into zones, add a clock, weather or a ticker, and choose how items change.
• Manage screens from an AI assistant. Point Claude or any MCP client at your server and manage screens in plain English.
• Integrations. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Power BI, Canva, Zapier and more.
• Solutions. Menu boards, meeting rooms, emergency alerts and other uses, start to finish.