Fire HD8 as a Roon Remote

[Robert_Weitzel]

NewEgg has Fire HD8 for less than $60 right now.
Installing Google Play by downloading the 4 necessary files and then installing Roon Remote through Google Play took less than 20 minutes. The remote is working well.

[bevan_court]

So I have a question the fire hd8, I download the play store and installed Roon. Despite being an 8 inch tablet, it is forcing me to use the phone GUI, which isn’t quite as what I’m used to with the screen on my Samsung a8. Is there a way to force it to the tablet GUI? Is it because of the play store version perhaps?

[r_t]

yes there is -take a look here, just sorted it out tonight.

I’ll be interested in how it compares to your other tablet as this is the only one i have.

[tangco]

Hi! am interested to find out how to use the tablet GUI on the HD8 as well - link doesn’t seem too helpful though. Could anyone provide instructions to change the GUI from phone to tablet on this device? Many, many thanks in advance!

[bevan_court]

Is that the right link? It’s about running core and remote on the same machine.

[xxx (Banned - toxicity)]

Android Display Settings

@r_t

Re the HD8 as Remote - thanks again for the link. I had a good play around and managed to find the point that Roon transitions from only portrait to only landscape display;

adb shell wm density “198” && adb reboot - portrait only
adb shell wm density “197” && adb reboot - landscape only

Oddly enough yesterday it did run in landscape a couple of times before i’d made any changes. When it did, there was a screen first telling me that Roon wasn’t happy with the resolution and did I want to go fullscreen.

[bearFNF]

AW man, you ninja-ed me,

Was composing a message with that link, too.

[bevan_court]

Awesome, thanks, set it at 160 and it works great. This includes the instructions as well

Tablet stuck in phone mode [SOLVED: bad DPI from manufacturer]

Can you try using the DPI changing method in the Lenovo thread and try to set it to 160?

[bevan_court]

So I’ve got 3 tablets that I’ve used. An old Galaxy tab 10.1 that has been rooted, overclocked and is now running nougat. However, I’m conscious that most apps no longer work on it and it’s hard to manually update everything.

However, running Roon with a large screen is nice, tho maybe a touch laggy now. I upgraded to a Galaxy tab a with an 8 inch screen. The old tab may work as an endpoint in the bedroom.

That is nice, but I use it a lot and often take it away with me, that means the wife can’t use it.

So I picked up the fire 8hd on amazon for virtually nothing. Although the screens are the same size, the 4:3 ratio of the tab a is sightly nicer as you see more screen in landscape.

However the fire is pretty nice once you have the dpi issue sorted out and great value.

[r_t]

thanks for stepping in @xxx - sorry been away from forum for a day or 2

thanks for the feedback on other tablets @bevan_court - I think I agree re the 4:3 being a better fit - though the HD8 is still pretty good. Ifeel the same way about laptops with 16:10 vs 16:9.

One thing that the Roon team could take a look at is the bars at the bottom / top - they’re ‘wasting’ space that could be used if the Roon app had a fullscreen toggle.

Not sure if its different on the iPad and maybe there’s some sort of 3rd party restriction on Amazons OS version of Android, but there are other apps on there like Kindle that can use the full screen so hopefully not.

Re 160 - I think your eyesight must be better than mine! I choose the largest that landscape could support. But iirc the only thing that changed much was the text size - you did see a little more there, but I dont think there was any additional album covers fitted in as you went down from 197 for example