[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Mr. Chen! Another nice day where we can meet again. You, you found an adapter? My my, what a peculiar looking thing that is! Alright then, yes, you've performed a remarkable service in finding that for me. Thank you Mr. Chen.

You know, just between me and you, I knew when I saw the auto-rotate to landscape that there was nothing wrong with the phone. It is a "feature", not a bug. I am an electronic tech so I worked on this stuff all my life. It was startling to see the image just "rotate on it's own" to landscape. I lost my entire bottom half the phone that way. And I have good buttons setup down there I want to get at. It is annoying. It is MY PHONE, I call the shots on when it turns, ...don't I?

...not really. Manufacturers and rom developers are going to do what is good for "the bulk of the population", not a few individuals. And, truth be told, the portrait view on HDTV would indeed cause massive areas of black on both sides of the image, due to the aspect ratio of the portrait image v.s. the wide screen landscape area of our HDTVs. It is kind of simple really. If you take a banana and drop it into an ordinary drinking glass, it will fit, vertically. But supposed you wanted that banana to "lie down sideways" in the drinking glass? Then, we would have a problem. It would not fit, at all. What do we do? Cut up the banana OR place the drinking glass in a furnace and get it so hot that it can be misshaped to accommodate our banana, on it's side? The population does not want drinking glasses that are super wide, low, and ridiculous to try and drink from. The standard drinking glass has to stay, no company can manufacture such goods with no market for it and stay in business. So, we must reshape the banana to fit the glass.

Which translates in our case to auto-rotation of the HDMI image to landscape so that it will fill the screen and give the consumer what he wants, a BIG PICTURE. In glorious high definition as you have recently educated me to see and enjoy. Thanks again Mr. Chen. We all need a little bit of education in our lives, no matter what our ages. I dug and found the "feature" you wish to disable and can easily make that happen, but you will not like what it does to the phone. But guess what? Since you helped me with the Samsung dongle, I will help you with the issue of a phone the way you like it AND easy to operate in landscape, okay? There is a magic feature built into our phones you have yet to use that can make this easy. It is called "Profiles". /Settings/Profiles/On and tap an unused profile or create a new one with the + button and call it "HDTV".

Now you have a clean desktop to use and for this profile, you hold the phone in landscape view, on it's side. No need to go super fancy like your personal desktop as this profile will be used for landscape usage and HDMI viewing. Get your widgets and shortcuts in place for landscape, be sure to enable the nav bar at bottom with home, windows, and return soft buttons. Since the desktop itself really does not auto rotate on it's own, only when you open an app, build your new desktop quickly with all necessary icons on top half only. To make this easy, do it while connected to HDMI TV so you know where "the cut off point" is and do not put anything below the bottom edge of the HDMI screen.

So what we are doing is to build a quick HDTV profile, switch to it when ready for HDMI, and now it is laid out so it is easy to use. We do not put "important stuff" where the screen gets cut off. Anything you can not get to by shortcut you can get to with the app drawer button, visible on the right side of picture. Put all of your video shortcuts, etc., on the top desktop for this profile. You are a very wise man, Mr. Chen. Make a multimedia desktop profile for HDMI and switch to it when using your cable or other methods of remote display.

It is the best I can offer, aside from modifying the phone not to rotate in HDMI. It is quick, easy, and gives you something fun to try. And when you have the time, just comment out the hdmi rotate/true line in build.prop by putting a # at the beginning of the line so you do not "mess it up", reboot, and see what happens. Since it specifically states auto-rotate hdmi, it may not eff-up the phone horribly and only affect the HDMI behavior. Won't know until we try. I will give you screenshots as a guide using the stock cm11 File Manager as well as some prep advice.

When build.prop file is selected in File Manager, save as a copy to your SDCard, in your "Chen" folder with my screen caps as a guide. This way if you mess up the file by accident, you have all of the information you might need to restore your original copy to it's proper location, overwriting the changed one, and set the permissions back as I have shown you in the screencap. Owner root, -rw-r--r-- and reboot to undo the change. Saving a copy of an important file prior to altering is always very good insurance.

Knowledge is power Mr. Chen. Even if you do not try this, you now know how and what to do, with pictures.

Thank you Mr. Chen. I must run along as I am far behind schedule today.

Best wishes my dear friend. :)