Running as a Kiosk

On Linux (Raspberry Pi OS, etc.)

We’ll be using Chromium-based browsers for this guide. To run Television Simulator in a full-screen kiosk, you can use the following command-line command:

chromium --kiosk --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=some-data-dir http://(your TVS URL)

Caution

For safety, don’t run this as your main browser and be careful of the content you ingest. Don’t use this to go just anywhere on the web.

Here’s a breakdown of each option:

• chromium: the executable of the browser. Might be google-chrome or brave, ungoogled-chromium etc. (only you know which one you installed)
• --kiosk: Runs in kiosk mode, full screen with no menu bar or address bar. Use command + q commandq alt + f4 altf4 to quit.
• --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required: Disables the autoplay restrictions that force TVS to start muted
• --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure: Allows a regular HTTP connection to be treated as an HTTPS connection.
• http:// your TVS URL: the place TVS is hosted on your local network. Unless you trust a public instance and the people running it I would stick to a LAN IP (http://192.168.1.123:8080 or whatever your IP is).

On Windows

The command does the same thing but it isn’t quite the same syntax. Press win + r winr win + r winr to open the Run dialog, then paste the following command:

"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --kiosk --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required --unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure --disable-web-security --user-data-dir="C:\tvs-kiosk-profile" http://localhost:3990

Before running, verify the following:

• Make sure Google Chrome is installed or change the path to the executable of your Chromium-based browser of choice.
• Change the URL at the end to your TVS URL. If you’re running it on the same machine using the Windows Launcher, it defaults to http://localhost:3990
• The --user-data-dir path is a folder where the browser will save its data for the kiosk sessions. You can change it to whatever you want but make sure it’s a folder that’s not used for anything else.

Running on User Log In

If you want to run this command whenever you log in, you can add it to the Startup folder:

1. Press win + r winr win + r winr to open the Run dialog.

2. Type shell:startup and press Enter. This will open the Startup folder.

3. Right-click inside the folder, select New > Text Document, and rename it to something like TVS Kiosk.bat. Make sure to change the file extension from .txt to .bat.

4. Right-click the new .bat file, select Edit, and paste the command from above into the file. Save and close.

CORS Mitigation

If a web service you rely on has no CORS headers, you might run into issues when trying to access it from Television Simulator since it runs in a browser.

• --disable-web-security: Allows you to access resources which have CORS restrictions.
• --user-data-dir=some-data-dir: Required if using --disable-web-security: Chromium runs in an isolated sandbox to try and protect you; it’ll save all user data somewhere else. Pick a folder path here and it looks like it’ll be created if it doesn’t exist.