Deckboy 🎬

Video playback and show control.

Deckboy puts videos, slides and live sources in a running order. Choose the next cue on your desk and take it to the audience when you're ready. Send the programme to screens, broadcast outputs or streams, and record it while it plays.

Free and open source, for Windows, macOS and Linux.

⬇ Download  ·  ▶ See Deckboy 419 in action  ·  ♡ Community & help

What you press, and what the audience sees, from one run of v0.99.419. Watch Deckboy with music by YMCK. Footage: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

If Deckboy is useful to you, ⭐ star this repository (top right): it is how the next operator finds it, and how you find it again.

New in 0.99.421

Release notes and downloads

• Every display in reach. Connected Displays now opens Video Outputs > Screen, with room for three, so a projector you plug in is there without scrolling.
• The tour on one screen. With a single display, the guided tour's output step hands the desk back with a key or a click, and the tour carries on.

A real crossfade in v0.99.419: the outgoing clip keeps playing until it has faded. Footage: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

Also in recent releases

• Learn the basics: a five-minute guided tour from the startup screen or MENU, in a practice show that leaves yours alone.

• Crossfades that keep moving: the clip on screen keeps playing while it fades out.

• Moiré, scopes that keep up, and a warp monitor that shows the output being warped.

• Master tracker: a pattern view with keyboard editing, cue, fade, volume and opacity cells, column mute/solo, jumps and named sections. The classic grid is still there.

• HDR: graphics over PQ or HLG feeds, HDR window output, ST 2110, SRT/enhanced RTMP and recording.

• Phone control: pair with a QR code; TAKE, transport, fader, cue list, DASH and tracker on one page.

• Lights and live audio: named fixtures over Art-Net or sACN, Mic cues with fades and processing, and live captions made on your machine.

• Projection: edge blending, test cards and saved defaults for new shows.

A closer look

Gameboy

Dark

Virtual Boy

All screenshots, GIFs and clips are real app captures. Desk, crossfades, effects and scopes: published v0.99.419. Other captures retain their original versions in the media notes.

New to Deckboy? Choose EXAMPLE SHOWS on the startup screen, read the notes on each cue and make the show your own.

Everything is a cue

A clip. A still. A slide. A live camera. A window on the machine. A web page. An NDI source, an SRT feed, an SDI input. A test card, a countdown, a lower third, an audio file, a line-up tone. A line of code you type while it is on the screen. In Deckboy every one of those is the same kind of object, sitting on the same cue list, and it behaves the same way: same transport, same fades, same seventeen transitions, same effect rack, same remote control, recorded the same way on the way out.

So a show can run

VIDEO → SLIDE → LIVE CAMERA → WEB PAGE → SRT FEED → TEST CARD → VIDEO

with one operator, one spacebar and no alt-tab, because none of those is a special case. The usual way to do that is a media player, a slide program, a browser, a capture utility, a streaming tool and a pattern generator, each with its own idea of what happens when you press play — and a projector that shows the seams between them.

The other half of the same idea: every destination is the same kind of object too. A screen, NDI, SRT, RTMP, Blackmagic SDI, SMPTE ST 2110 — several at once, while it records, each with its own warp, feather and area of interest. Driven from a Stream Deck, Bitfocus Companion, OSC, MIDI, MIDI Show Control from the lighting desk, Art-Net or LTC timecode.

Anything that can make a picture or a sound becomes a cue. Anything that needs to receive the show becomes an output.

It hosts your own VST3 effects and instruments in a cue's audio chain, and runs on a machine with no sound card at all — a rack PC feeding a video wall still opens, plays and puts a picture out.

Windows, macOS and Linux from one show file. No account, no licence server, no telemetry, and no second licence for the spare machine in the flight case — which is not true of most of what it gets compared to.

deckboy website — what it does, and where to download it. · How it compares to Mitti, PlaybackPro, QLab, Millumin, vMix, SimplePlay, PlayDeck, ProVideoPlayer, Resolume and Inkue. · Manual — all of it, thirty chapters. · FAQ · Where latency hides — the four stages of a live chain, in frames and milliseconds

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Community & help

Questions, bugs, production stories, or ideas? Visit the community page or read the support guide, join GitHub Discussions, or contribute. For security issues, please use private reporting, not public issues.

Deckboy is free software. If it helps you run a show, share your experience, report a bug, improve the docs, or tell another operator about it. That's how the project grows.

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Download

Try the example shows — five shows that work up one step at a time: a picture on a screen, a running order, layers and titles, looks and effects, and a 39-second show run from one button with original music. Open the .deckboy files and follow the cue notes.

The features below describe the current source. Packaged builds and their version-specific changes are listed on the releases page.

Every release ships an installer and a portable build for each platform. Both bundle the application, FFmpeg and its runtime libraries for ordinary file playback. NDI uses the separately installed NDI runtime; SDI uses compatible Blackmagic hardware and Desktop Video. Office slide conversion uses PowerPoint, Keynote or LibreOffice on the machine. Full requirements.

Platform	Installer	Portable
Windows	…-windows-x64-setup.exe — Start Menu, uninstaller, .deckboy file association	…-windows-x64.zip
macOS (Apple Silicon)	…-macos-arm64.dmg — drag to Applications	…-macos-arm64.zip
macOS (Intel)	…-macos-x86_64.dmg	…-macos-x86_64.zip
Linux	…-x86_64.AppImage — one file, chmod +x and run; or …-x86_64.flatpak	…-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Deckboy Mini comes inside all of those, and on its own as a small download of about 12 to 18 MB: Deckboy-Mini-…-windows-x64.zip, …-macos-arm64.zip, …-macos-x86_64.zip, …-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, and …-linux-arm64.tar.gz for a Raspberry Pi (64-bit) or any ARM64 Linux.

Both control surfaces ship with every release, so neither needs a build: Stream Deck (…streamDeckPlugin — double-click it) and Bitfocus Companion (Deckboy-companion-module-….zip — unzip it, then point Companion's developer modules path at the folder containing it; INSTALL.txt inside has the three steps). The Companion module requires Companion 5.

→ Latest release

Or from a package manager, which follows each new release:

# Windows (Scoop)
scoop bucket add deckboy https://github.com/Utopian-Academy/scoop-deckboy
scoop install deckboy/deckboy

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install --cask utopian-academy/deckboy/deckboy

Deckboy's Windows builds are unsigned and macOS builds are ad-hoc signed. Neither carries a verified publisher signature, so the OS may warn when you first open a download.

• macOS — if it says the app is damaged, clear the quarantine flag once:

  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Deckboy.app
  

  Install from the .dmg into Applications rather than running from Downloads; that is also what avoids Gatekeeper's App Translocation sandbox.

• Windows — SmartScreen may say "Windows protected your PC". Click More info → Run anyway.

• Linux — the AppImage runs on Ubuntu 22.04 and anything newer, which is what a lot of venue machines are still on. Graphics, display server, audio and the C/C++ runtime deliberately come from the host: they have to match the machine actually running, and a bundled libGL cannot load your GPU driver. The build checks that floor on every run rather than trusting it.

Deckboy checks interface labels at startup and automatically tries another rendering path when needed. The FAQ explains the renderer log and how to select software rendering on a Mac.

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What it is

Deckboy is a native desktop application for video engineers, AV technicians and live operators who need a reliable way to organise media, trigger cues, loop content and send video to production displays.

That is the job it is built around, and it is built on a stubborn principle: Seize the means of playback ♡

No subscription ♡ No account ♡ No telemetry ♡ Nothing phones home. And no licence server that can refuse to start the show at 19:55 because it could not reach the internet. The machine you carried into the venue is the machine that plays the show.

What can be a cue

Video · Image · Audio	files, hardware-decoded, trimmed and faded
Slides	a PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote deck, one cue per slide, with the notes
Browser	a URL rendered into the programme, not a browser window on your desktop
Window · Screen · Camera	captured live, at the window's own full resolution
NDI · SRT / RTMP / RTSP / UDP · DeckLink · Spout	somebody else's signal, taken in as a cue
Pattern · Test card · Tone	generated on the spot, no file needed
Timer · Lower third	a stage countdown, full screen or over the programme, and a name strap in 52 looks
Video synth · Code	an oscillator with feedback, or an expression you type live

Every row takes the same fades, the same transitions, the same effect rack, the same trigger from a Stream Deck, and is recorded the same way on the way out. Chapter 5 of the manual is the full table, source by source.

Which makes it a very good video Swiss army knife

That is not a second feature list. It is what falls out of the first one. If a camera is a cue and SDI is an output, the machine is a converter. If a stream is a cue and NDI is an output, it is a bridge. If a test card is a cue, it is a pattern generator that proves the real chain instead of a test box's.

The same box speaks NDI, SDI, SMPTE ST 2110, SRT, RTMP, Spout, LTC timecode, OSC, Art-Net and NMOS — so the machine you brought for playout usually solves the other five problems on the day as well.

• Convert media that will not play well, in place, without leaving the app
• Inspect any file — codec, raster, frame rate, channels, duration — by importing it
• Generate test patterns and a test card to prove a chain end to end
• Capture a camera, a window or a screen and treat it as a cue
• Bridge formats — bring a camera, capture card or stream in and send the programme out as SDI, ST 2110 or a stream, and record it
• Normalize loudness to a chosen −16, −23 or −24 LUFS target before playout
• Generate LTC timecode on its own routable output

Where it gets used

Live events • Corporate presentations • Churches • Schools & universities • Museums & installations • Digital signage • Projection • LED walls • Streaming

And the jobs in between: bench-testing a screen before anyone arrives, proving a cable or converter with a real test card, getting a camera or a stream onto SDI, restreaming to SRT or RTMP, or making a client's unplayable file playable on site, minutes before doors.

Deckboy Mini

For a screen nobody has to run: a foyer loop, a backstage monitor, a kiosk that starts with the computer. deckboy-mini ships beside Deckboy: point it at clips or a folder and it plays them fullscreen through the same engine as the desk, in name order, holding stills, looping if you ask. It answers the desk's remote commands on the desk's port, so Companion drives it as deck 1, and the whole show runs from the keyboard in its terminal, over SSH too: reorder, rename and remove cues, save and open playlists (M3U8), pick the display and the sound device, and the keys a media player has — frame step, speed, A-B loop, mute, sound track and subtitles. It keeps a media player's running-order habits too: find a cue by name, queue the one to play next, stop after this cue, shuffle, a clock that counts down, and a crossfade between cues. It opens .pls lists as well as M3U8. On a Raspberry Pi it plays through the board's own video decoder; tools/linux_build.sh --mini builds it there. Its own miniature manual has every key and command. Mini comes inside every download, and on its own as a small download for Windows, macOS, Linux and the Raspberry Pi (64-bit) on the releases page.

deckboy-mini ~/Videos --display 2 --loop

In Windows PowerShell, start it as .\deckboy-mini from its folder; PowerShell does not run a program from the current folder by its bare name. Or drop files onto deckboy-mini.exe.

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Features

The full list is long, because so much can be a cue. It lives on its own page: all features, in nine groups:

• Playback & cues
• Sources — everything that can be a cue
• Outputs — everywhere a cue can go
• Presenting from slides
• Broadcast / IP video
• Audio
• Show control
• Effects & mixing
• Interface

Built for operators, not data harvesters

Deckboy collects nothing and sends nothing to its developers. No telemetry, no usage reporting, no crash upload, no account. Crash logs are written to a file next to the app for you to read or forward, and they stay there.

There is an update check, and it is off by default. Switched on, it asks GitHub's releases API whether a newer version exists — nothing about you goes with the question, and finding one never installs anything without you saying so. A machine sitting on a venue's network should do nothing nobody asked it to.

It is deliberately network-active — NDI discovery, PTP, NMOS registration, OSC, Companion control and streaming all talk to the network by design. Every one of those goes to your own LAN or to a destination you configured.

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Platforms

One show file opens on Windows, macOS and Linux, and nearly everything above runs on all three. The exception: texture sharing with Resolume, TouchDesigner or OBS is Spout, on Windows only.

Hardware decode is used wherever the platform provides it — D3D11VA, Video Toolbox, VAAPI — and on Windows and macOS the picture never touches system memory on the way to the screen: roughly ten times less CPU for 4K, which is CPU your machine gets to spend on everything else.

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Documentation

• Code map — file inventory, data flow, threading model
• Packaging guide
• Changelog
• ST 2110 feasibility

The changelog is the authoritative record of what landed and, just as importantly, what each feature deliberately does not do.

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Friends of Deckboy

• AV Tools Pro — free AV design calculators: projector throw and brightness, AVoIP and Dante/AES67 bandwidth, video wall and LED pixel pitch, cable, rack and PoE planning

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Roadmap

Audio, next:

• Multichannel audio files, up to 24 channels each, every channel routable
• Effects on a device's outputs as well as on each cue
• Fades that ramp effect settings and playback speed, not only level
• Object audio: place a cue in your speaker layout and move it across the room
• Named outputs and an output patch editor

Show control:

• Cue carts, and templates for new shows
• Defaults that say what they do: forgetting your saved defaults (which only changes what NEW starts from) told apart plainly from the show that is open
• A routing map: tap a deck's "to Out 1" tag to see where every deck, layer and output goes
• A lighting dashboard, beyond the fixture patch
• MIDI and OSC monitors: every message arriving, as it arrives, with what Deckboy did with it, so a controller that "does nothing" can be seen
• Live scoreboard data as a source: the clock, scores and fouls read off a venue's scoreboard by OSO (Open Scoreboard OCR) and its XML/JSON feed, driving text and lower thirds on the outputs

The face:

• A face you can make your own: how it looks, what it does and what it talks about, including lines you write yourself. Every setting starts from the face as it is today, and none of them can touch playback, routing or outputs

Picture:

• Lip sync held within a few milliseconds across a whole day of playback, on every platform
• HDR the rest of the way: HDR over SDI shown on a real DeckLink card (it is built, not yet tested on one), HDR in over SDI, HDR over NDI (which needs NDI's separately licensed Advanced SDK), and HDR input on macOS and Linux
• Local AI upscaling: an upscale job that turns a clip into a sharper, bigger file, and real-time upscaling on the GPU where the hardware offers it
• Drawing on the picture: a pen that draws over the output live, the way a sports telestrator does, and paint cues drawn ahead of time that take, fade and layer like any other cue

Scopes:

• False colour on the picture scopes
• Sound scopes: loudness to EBU R 128, true peak, phase and spectrum
• Scopes on the desk, on any output and over NDI

Deckboy Mini:

• A media browser in the terminal: browse folders, filter by typing and add clips without leaving the keyboard, shared with the desk's own browser

Web Monitor and network:

• A Web Monitor at full resolution and the right shape, that pauses, rewinds and returns to live without losing the picture
• Encrypted connections (HTTPS) for the Web Monitor and the phone remote

Platform:

• Hardware-paced ST 2110 output for narrow-model compliance
• Syphon input on macOS as a cue source (Spout already works both ways on Windows)

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License

Deckboy is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. Copyright © 2026 Deckboy Contributors. The full text is in LICENSE.

Bundled components keep their own licences — ffmpeg ships with its LGPL/GPL notice beside the binary, and the NDI and DeckLink SDKs are loaded at runtime rather than distributed.

NDI® is a registered trademark of Vizrt NDI AB.

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Contributing

Deckboy is built in the open and contributions are welcome — code, bug reports, documentation, testing, or production feedback from a real show.

The best open-source tools are built by the communities that use them.

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Project status

Actively developed, on all three platforms. Windows, macOS and Linux build from the same source and every commit is checked by CI in both full and reduced-feature configurations — macOS as a self-contained app bundle, Linux as a portable tarball and an AppImage.