Understanding Live Session Mode
The foundation the rest of this section builds on — the two tabs on /present, and the three ways your display can look while it's running.
Quick answer
Live Session Mode is manual control of your kiosk display, run from /present — see Running a Friday khutbah with Live Session for the full walkthrough. /present has two tabs: Khutbah, which is always Camera-Dominant once it goes live, and Lecture, which has its own Slide-Dominant/Camera-Dominant choice for your slide decks. While nothing's live, your display just runs normal Kiosk Mode.
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-Dominant Mode
The live camera feed takes over the main display full-bleed, with a Caption Bar across the bottom showing your khutbah text (and, optionally, a title-card image behind it — see What the congregation sees). This is the Khutbah tab's only mode — whenever a khutbah is genuinely live, it's Camera-Dominant. On the Lecture tab, Camera-Dominant is a choice: pick it before pressing Start Camera to have your slide deck's camera take over full-bleed instead of the deck itself.
Panel B is independent of Main: on the Khutbah tab, a toggle on /present switches it between the timetable and an uploaded image, any time during the session; on the Lecture tab, Panel B has no toggle — it shows the timetable normally and switches to the live camera automatically the moment Camera Capture is actually running.
Slide-Dominant Mode
Your slide deck stays full-size in the main display, manually advanced with Prev/Next, instead of the camera taking over — this is the Lecture tab's default. If you've also started the camera while Slide-Dominant is selected, it shows in Panel B instead of the timetable, not full-bleed. Khutbah has no Slide-Dominant option — it's always Camera-Dominant once live.
Choosing a mode on the Lecture tab
The Lecture tab's Main-mode toggle has two options:
- Slide-Dominant (the default) — picking a deck goes live immediately, full-size in the main display.
- Camera-Dominant — pins the full-bleed camera view over your deck. Selecting it doesn't take effect on the kiosk until you actually press Start Camera — it's staged locally on /present until then, so there's no risk of the display flickering into camera view before you're ready.
See Running a Friday khutbah with Live Session for where this control sits and how to start the camera.
Still stuck?
The Awqōt team is happy to help with Live Session Mode.