How Deckboy compares

Deckboy is a cue-based video playback deck: a playlist of clips that go to air when the operator says so, out of a machine, into a screen. These are the tools it actually sits beside on a show. It is not trying to be all of them, and for several jobs one of them is plainly the right call. This page says which is which, because a comparison that flatters itself throughout is an advertisement wearing a lab coat.

The thing the table is really saying

Four of the five are macOS only, and the fifth is Windows only. Mitti, PlaybackPro, QLab and Millumin do not run on a PC at all; vMix does not run on a Mac. If the machine going to the venue is not the machine the software wants, that is the end of the conversation before features are even discussed.

Where Deckboy tends to fit

• The job is playing video cues, reliably, on the night. A playlist of clips with trim, fades, loops and hold-last-frame, hardware-accelerated decode, and a cue that knows how long it has left, and thirteen cue-to-cue transition styles — cut, crossfade, dips, four pushes, four wipes and an iris. If a client sends a file that will not play, it converts in place without leaving the application; if they send one mastered too quietly, it normalises to EBU R128. That is the day job, and everything below is what happens after it is handled.
• The show machine is a PC, or a mixture. "QLab for Windows" and "Mitti for Windows" are common searches for a reason. Deckboy runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux from the same show file.
• The signal has to leave in more than one shape. NDI, SRT, RTMP, Blackmagic SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 can run at once, so the playback machine often solves the conversion problem on the day as well.
• It has to be driven from a surface. A Stream Deck plugin and a Bitfocus Companion module, plus OSC, MIDI, Art-Net and LTC timecode.
• Slides are part of the show. PDF, PowerPoint and Keynote import as one cue per slide with speaker notes, and presenter and prompter views are output types of their own. Most cue players do not handle slides at all.
• The sound needs to follow the picture. Five of the fourteen per-cue audio effects read the frame they are playing under — its brightness, where it sits in the raster, how long it has left. A plug-in in a desk receives samples and nothing else, so it cannot.
• Budget is zero. GPL-3.0, and nothing phones home.

Where one of the others is the better answer

• A Mac-only shop that wants the most refined cue player — buy Mitti. It is focused, mature and beautifully made, and being narrower than Deckboy is the point of it rather than a shortcoming.
• Corporate events where the operator already knows the tool — PlaybackPro. Years of rooms behind it, and familiarity on a show day is worth more than a feature list.
• Audio-led theatre cueing on a Mac — QLab. A deep audio cue model and lighting cues in the same stack. Deckboy is video-first and has no lighting cues.
• Projection mapping and live visuals — Millumin. Deckboy has warp, keystone and edge blend per output, which covers ordinary multi-projector work, but it is not a mapping suite.
• Multi-camera switching and streaming a programme — vMix. Deckboy is a source and a player, not a switcher. The two pair well: Deckboy out over NDI, vMix taking it as an input.

Honest caveats

• The builds are not code-signed. Signing needs paid Apple and Microsoft developer accounts that the project has not bought, so macOS and Windows will warn about an unknown developer. The README explains the one-time steps.
• It is a young project compared with everything else on this page, and it has not survived the number of show days those tools have. Mitti and PlaybackPro have been quietly not-failing in ballrooms for years, which is a form of credential no feature list can forge.
• It does an alarming number of things. Some people read a video synthesiser and a Famicom sound chip inside a playout tool as range. Others read it as a warning. Both readings are defensible.