Understanding Live Session Mode
The foundation the rest of this section builds on — the picker and PIN that get you into Live Session Control Panel (awqot.app/present), the Camera and Slides tabs, the three ways your display can look while it's running, and when a session ends on its own.
Quick answer
Live Session Mode is manual control of your kiosk display, run from Live Session Control Panel — see Running a Friday khutbah with Live Session for the full walkthrough. Getting in requires choosing who's presenting from a picker screen and entering a 4-digit PIN — signing in to Live Session Control Panel alone doesn't start anything. Once you're in, the Camera and Slides tabs choose what you can tap, and tapping a tab never changes the kiosk by itself. While nothing's live, your display just runs normal Kiosk Mode. A live session doesn't need to be ended by hand — it ends on its own after a long quiet spell or at the next adzan.
Who's presenting: the picker and PIN
Before either tab is even reachable, Live Session Control Panel shows a picker: In-house plus a tile for each ustaz or ustazah currently approved at your mosque. Picking a tile and entering the right 4-digit PIN is what actually starts a session — there's no way to reach the controls without it. This exists so it's always clear, in the log and in the moment, who was actually running a given session — see Understanding asatizah accounts for how asatizah get onto this picker in the first place.
Full step-by-step, including PIN setup and what happens if someone else is already live, is in Running a Friday khutbah with Live Session.
Kiosk Mode (the default)
This is what your display shows whenever nobody's running a live session — your announcement slides auto-advancing in rotation, with the prayer times sidebar alongside them. Nothing to start or configure; it's just the display's resting state.
Camera view
The live camera feed takes over the main display full-bleed, with a Caption Bar across the bottom showing your khutbah text (and, optionally, an image behind it — see What the congregation sees). This is how the khutbah looks once it's live: the camera is running and the khutbah tile's caption text is on. If the text is off, the camera can still be live — you see the camera, and the page calls it Camera live, not khutbah live. For an ustaz or ustazah, the Camera tab shows the camera full-bleed over their deck once the camera is running.
Panel B is independent of the main display: with the khutbah selected, Panel B under Display settings switches it between the timetable and an uploaded image, any time during the session; for an ustaz or ustazah, Panel B has no switch — it shows the timetable normally and switches to the live camera automatically the moment the kiosk camera is actually running.
Slides view
Your slide deck stays full-size in the main display, manually advanced with Prev / Next (or by typing a page number into the box between them), instead of the camera taking over. This is what you get when you tap a deck on the Slides tab. If you also start the camera while a deck is showing, it shows in Panel B instead of the timetable, not full-bleed. The khutbah has no slides view — it's always the camera view once live.
The camera can be genuinely live in the background even while it isn't full-bleed — Panel B's colour on the Kiosk layout card is how you tell: timetable-coloured means it isn't running, camera-coloured means it is.
The Camera and Slides tabs
The two tabs sit beside the Preview. Tapping one only puts you in standby — nothing changes on the kiosk until you tap something inside it:
- Camera tab (In-house, when a khutbah is loaded) — the khutbah is selected and your slide decks are greyed out. A deck still showing on the kiosk is labelled Currently Active and stays greyed. The khutbah tile goes live when the camera is running and you tap it, and each later tap hides or shows the caption text.
- Slides tab — the khutbah is greyed out and your slide decks can be tapped; a deck goes live the instant you tap it.
The page asks you to confirm only when a tap would swap a live deck for the khutbah, or the live khutbah for a deck. See Running a Friday khutbah with Live Session for where everything sits and how to start the camera.
When a live session ends on its own
You can end a session yourself at any time with Reset Session (clears the kiosk, keeps you signed in) or Leave session (back to the picker). If you don't, it ends by itself:
- Quiet for an hour — if nothing is tapped for 1 hour, Still presenting? appears. Tap Tap to continue to carry on.
- Quiet for 30 more minutes — if there's still no tap, the session ends and the kiosk goes back to its normal display. The picker then tells you why.
- At the next adzan — a live session ends at the next adzan. Five minutes before, the page shows This live session ends at … (hh:mm). On Friday the Zohor adzan does not end a session, so the next one is Asar.
- At its time limit — a khutbah session ends automatically 45 minutes after it started; any other live session (a slide deck or a lecture) ends 2½ hours after it started. Tapping doesn't extend this — start a new session from the picker if you need longer.
- If Live Session Control Panel stops checking in — if it goes quiet for 15 minutes (a tablet that was switched off, crashed or lost its connection), its session is treated as abandoned. The next person to open the picker sees it cleared, with the message The previous session timed out (no activity for 15 minutes) and was cleared.
Only a real tap counts as activity — moving slides, picking a deck or image, starting the camera, changing a setting, or tapping Tap to continue. Leaving the page open doesn't.
Still stuck?
The Awqōt team is happy to help with Live Session Mode.