Digital signage screens randomly going black at one of our locations and i cant figure out why

Posted by JakeInAv@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 29 comments

ok need help. (apologies if this is not the right sub for this question) but we have 5 locations on the same setup. one of them keeps going black at random times. not the whole location. usually 1 of 4 screens. comes back on its own after like 15 to 20 min sometimes longer.
things ive ruled out:

1/network is fine. checked with the locations IT.
2/HDMI cables are seated. swapped one out as a test. same issue.
3/player itself shows online in our CMS the whole time.
4/power isnt cycling at the outlet. plugged in a separate device to test.
5/not heat. ambient is fine. ran it without the bezel for a week.manager at that location swears its happening more during peak hours but i cant correlate it to anything. only happens at this one location. other 4 are fine.
current theories:
6/something on the building network briefly blocking the player

before i drive 3 hours to swap out hardware just to test, has anyone seen this pattern before?? specifically the “1 of 4 at one location” piece. all screens are same model same age same setup. only one is acting up.

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Flabbergasted98@reddit

I see power saving feature a few times.

But also electricity?

have you looked at at how the cables are wired? what other other electrical components are bing utilized in the vicinity?

It' not just about checking to make sure the ports are cabled correctly, but what type of cables are crossing those cables? I've seen situations where monitors go offline everytime someone runs the space heater under their desk or their microwave.

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sagiadinos@reddit

Did you check the content?

Sometimes people upload huge images the media player cannot handle.

Greetings Niko

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

Yeah content is identical across all 5 locations and the other 4 are fine on the same playlist so its hard to pin on file size in this case but I agree with the principle, ive seen oversized files cause weirdness on underspec players before. For what it’s worth this set is mostly 1080p mp4s under 100mb each, png images under 5mb nothing thats going to crush a player.

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haamfish@reddit

Static electricity? The monitors on my desk all flicker when someone touches the divider.

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thetrivialstuff@reddit

This is my guess as well - if something isn't properly grounded, this is how displays react to static discharges.

Here's ElectroBOOM having exactly this problem and how he solves it:

https://youtu.be/-lTdZFEQPn8?t=310

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

Wait actually this makes more sense than I thought it would. The location does get a lot of foot traffic right past that screen and the manager said the outages happen more during peak hours…. I don’t know why I hadnt connected those two things until your comment. I’m going to check grounding on the mount and the player rack when im on site. If it ends up being grounding, was your fix on the mount itself or did you address it at the player end?

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ExceptionEX@reddit

What type of equipment are you using, I've run into this a lot, we have a location with 12 different displays all over the building.

We've had issues with HDMI over Ethernet being very easy to damage with voltage spikes.

We had to add a HDMI signal booster depending on the the number of outputs on a HDMI splitter.

In a smaller location we actually swapped out about $800 worth of equipment for $300 worth of Amazon's digital signage fire sticks, no local signal PC all manageable by staff from Amazon Web UI.

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

Not running HDMI over ethernet on this one but you just made me realize i havent stress tested the setup at one of our other locations the same way. Voltage spikes at multi screen sites is exactly the kind of thing that would show up as intermittent random behavior. adding it to the list.
What booster brand has held up for you?
Been burned by no name ones in the past so usually overpay for the brand i know works.
On the fire stick swap thats interesting, we ended up on dedicated players running lsquared because we needed multi location content scheduling and the consumer device options at the time felt fragile to me, for a single location your $300 vs $800 swap makes a lot of sense though. Did you find the management ui handled the swap okay or did you have to rebuild a lot of the workflow?

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ExceptionEX@reddit

On the booster I'll be honest it was some cheap starTech thing, we wanted to test to see if it would improve it and its worked, and even though they are pretty cheap, we have several of them that are more than 3 years old and working fine.

Well the management is a bit more complex, like you have have a CMS for signage or sign up for one that works with the amazon signage sticks, dshub is good for small clients. onsign is another one that seems to be popular and works well enough. Obviously there is a cost here, but you can manage multiple locations with multiple per location if need be.

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Bogus1989@reddit

gonna remember this for future. god forbid i ever have to deal with these again lol.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

When you say network is fine, how did you verify?

Idk how big this sign is, but can you hook it up to a known working location? I’d rule out a layer 1 issue. Swap it with another one, see if issue follows.

Hopefully it’s not one of those big signs lol

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

When I say network is fine i mean the locations IT ran checks during a couple of the outage windows and didnt flag anything CMS also showed the player as online with content syncing the whole time layer 1 on the hdmi side is the gap im not fully covered on and a couple commenters here are pushing me toward that and i think theyre right.

I havent physically swapped the screen with one from another location yet because of the install but thats next swap a known working unit in, see if the issue follows the screen or stays at the location should isolate it to one of three things in a single move screen, signal chain, or environment, not the worst case for a swap but not fun either lol.

Tbh I would’ve been f****d if I hadn’t been able to see 5 locations at once on the cms dashboard, I probably would have assumed it’s random normal glitch and not have seen that it was always the same screen at the same location every time.

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Curious201@reddit

first thing i would check is whether all five displays are actually losing signal, or whether only the panels after a splitter/extender are dropping. the “1 of 4 screens goes black and comes back” pattern sounds more like hdmi/dp signal chain, power saving, or a bad splitter/extender port than a content/player problem. i would swap the suspect screen with a known good one, swap cables, move it to a different splitter output, and check if the problem follows the screen, the cable, or the port. also turn off any sleep/eco/auto input switching features on the TVs, and check whether the displays are consumer TVs being used like signage panels. if this is digital signage, i would want one small diagram of player → splitter/extender → screens before chasing software ghosts.

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

Wait this is exactly what I needed!! thank you!
Signal chain isolation is what im going to try first. There is an hdmi extender in this setup that i didnt mention in the original post because i had it lower on my suspect list. the cms shows the player healthy so i was assuming if signal was leaving the player it was reaching the screen. but you make the right point. player online doesnt mean signal reaching the screen cleanly.
Im goong to swap one variable at a time, screen, then cable, then extender and bring eco/auto input back to defaults on the tv just to be sure. These are commercial spec but they were inherited from a previous installer so im not 100 percent on the spec sheet for this batch. I’ll verify when im on site and update with what i find.

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Curious201@reddit

glad it helped. if you can, take a few photos of the setup before changing anything too, especially the player, extender, splitter, power, and cable paths. when these issues are intermittent, having the exact before/after layout saves a lot of guessing later. i would only change one variable at a time if possible, otherwise it gets really hard to know whether it was the screen, cable, extender port, or tv setting that actually fixed it.

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FireCyber88@reddit

Bro, you forgot the most important piece of information. No sympathy for you. What signage solution are you using? Call tech support

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JakeInAv@reddit (OP)

fair point lol. running on Lsquared, i reached out to them last week and theyve been helpful but their take was the same as mine. cms shows the player healthy through the outages, no errors logged, content syncing fine. so theyve been pointing me toward hardware or signal chain rather than
software. which i think is right but figured id crowd source before driving 3 hours. I would have caught this faster if id focused more on their player diagnostics instead of assuming player online meant signal getting through.

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Drywesi@reddit

They may be rawdogging it themselves.

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FireCyber88@reddit

Prolly. Use Yodeck. It’s been great.

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marklein@reddit

Swap hardware, I"ll be that you have a bad (also repairable) screen.

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Forward_Signature184@reddit

Recently dealt with this on a brightsign unit and found the usb power supply that was used when it was moved was half the needed wattage. Swapped to the correct power supply and it has been working for two weeks now

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2014ChevyCaptiva@reddit

Is there a timer set on the monitor which only allows it to operate during certain times?

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NeighborGeek@reddit

Going black doesn’t mean it’s a problem with the player device, it could be the display. Are these regular tv/monitors?
When the screen is black, is the display still on? If it has any built in menus or the ability to change inputs, can you bring up the menu or change input?

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HoosierLarry@reddit

I’ve seen this before with some cheap Android based digital signage systems that were “inherited”. After consulting the documentation, it explicitly stated that they weren’t designed to run 24x7, which we were doing.

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Necromater@reddit

are there any diagnostics or logging on the defective device? without knowing device specifics, hard to help. But is there firmware that could be updated? I have had high strangeness solved by flashing the ROM with an update. Also is there manufacture support? there will usually be a set of codes in a log that will tell a story.

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