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 in action · ♡ Community & help
What you press, and what the audience sees, from one run of v0.99.423. 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.
- Colour pickers on the effects. Pick from any window on any screen, type a hex, R G B or hue, or a CSS or RAL name. Add your own colour tables (a brand palette, Pantone if you hold its values) as CSV. Strobe and edges now take any colour.
- LEARN THE BASICS fits your screens. One, two, three or mirrored: the practice picture goes on a screen the desk is not on, and plugging a screen in mid-tour moves it there.
- Fixed: the tour's crossfade step stuck on video clips, and resumed tours that counted the wrong TAKE.
- Companion module 1.0.8 with an Effect colour action, in the download.
Picture scopes Waveform, vectorscope, parade and gamut measurements from the moving test card. |
Lights by name Fixture levels and colours in the cue list. |
Live input, cued A Mic cue's gain and meter, shown with the built-in test signal. |
The phone controller Watch it select and take cues. |
The current desk in three themes
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.
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
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.
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.
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"Unknown developer" warnings — what to do
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.appInstall from the
.dmginto 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.
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.
| 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 Lower Third 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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
Audio, next:
- Multichannel audio files, up to 24 channels each, every channel routable
- Object audio: place a cue in your speaker layout and move it across the room
Show control:
- Cue carts, and templates for new shows
- 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
- 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:
- 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
- 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)
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.
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.
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.