A cue deck for live video ♡ Drag the clip in, trim it, fade it, loop it,
hold the last frame ♡ NDI, SRT, SDI and ST 2110 out at once ♡ And it plays your slide decks too,
presenter view and all
Windows, macOS and Linux, one show file. Free under the GPL: no account, no licence
server, nothing that phones home.
Cues going to air, then effects stacked onto the live picture, then the built-in video synth. Shown with the test patterns Deckboy generates itself.
A playlist of clips that go to air when you say so. Drag media in, trim it, fade it, loop it, hold the last frame rather than reveal a desktop. Thirteen ways to get from one cue to the next — cut, crossfade, dip through black or white, pushes, wipes, an iris — set for the deck and overridden on any cue that wants its own. Hardware decoding, frame-accurate transport, and a cue that knows how long it has left. Then a rack of pixel effects on the live picture, every parameter drivable from an oscillator, because sometimes the brief is “can it look a bit broken, but on purpose”.
NDI, SRT, RTMP, Blackmagic SDI and SMPTE ST 2110, several at once, each with its own area of interest, edge feather and warp. Uncompressed IP video is normally the preserve of equipment that arrives with a quotation attached.
A PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote deck imports as one cue per slide, speaker notes and all, rendered once on the way in so nothing during the show depends on a document program. Presenter view is an output type in its own right — live slide, the one before, the one after, the notes, the clock — and so is a mirrored prompter that scrolls at a pace you set. Most cue players do not do slides. At all. The usual alternative is somebody’s laptop, a long cable and a prayer.
No account. No dongle. No licence server, no seat count, no trial that expires on the morning of the gig. GPL-3.0, free for good — which is a reliability argument as much as a principle, because a licence check is one more thing that can refuse to start a show at 19:55, in a venue whose wi-fi would first like you to accept its terms and conditions. No telemetry either. Deckboy has never needed the network to play a file, and the only thing it sends anywhere is your video.
A per-cue rack on the live picture — displacement, feedback, reaction–diffusion, pixel sort, datamosh, Chladni plates — with every parameter drivable from an oscillator. Each one is benchmarked to fit inside a 60fps frame at 1080p before it ships.
Then the five only Deckboy has, because they need the picture and the sound in one object and a plug-in only ever gets samples: Picture (the video drives the filter), Placement (where the shot sits on the raster is where it sits in the room), Seam (the end of the cue resolves the tail), Frame lock (stutter quantised to the frame period) and Suspend (a held cue keeps its room tone). How it holds the frame budget.
Presenter view is an output type of its own, so it takes its own display. Here it is part-way through a build: the live slide holds still while the notes advance a step at a time, the part already spoken greys out, and the footer counts what is left before the next cue.
> Clip in. Trimmed, faded, looped, holding the last frame.
> NDI in. SDI, SRT and ST 2110 out. At the same time.
> PowerPoint in. Presenter view on its own display, notes and all.
> A compressor that can see the shot it is compressing.
> 36 video effects, each one benchmarked into a 60fps frame.
> No account. No licence server. No telemetry. No catch.
> Windows, macOS and Linux. One show file.