The ones that actually get asked before a show.
Deckboy sends and receives NDI on Windows, macOS and Linux, at no cost. An NDI source can be added as a cue and played like any other clip, and any output can send NDI while also sending SRT, RTMP, Blackmagic SDI or SMPTE ST 2110 — simultaneously, not instead of each other.
Import the clip, set the cue to loop, and send the deck to a fullscreen output on the
display you want. When a cue ends Deckboy holds the last frame rather than revealing a
desktop, which is the failure everybody has seen in a foyer. There is also a soak mode
(--soak) that logs memory and stalls, so a machine can be proven before it is
left unattended for a week.
Manual: Playlists, Loop, Shuffle & Cue Endings
Yes — there is a Stream Deck plugin and a Bitfocus Companion module. Both poll Deckboy's status, so a key carries tally, transport state, output health and a countdown: the button knows whether the cue it fired actually went live, rather than just hoping. OSC, MIDI, Art-Net and LTC timecode work too.
Yes, and this is the thing Deckboy does that the other cue players do not do at all. A PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote deck imports as one cue per slide, sitting in the playlist next to the video and the audio, fired by the same keys, the same Stream Deck, the same timecode.
Every page is rendered once on the way in, by the platform’s own engine —
Edge’s on Windows, Preview’s on macOS, pdftoppm on Linux — so
during the show a slide is just a picture. Nothing depends on a document program still being
open, still being on the right slide, or still being in the foreground.
Speaker notes come in with the deck. Presenter view is an output type of its own, so it takes its own display: live slide, the one before, the one after, the notes and a clock. So is a mirrored prompter that scrolls at a pace you set. The alternative most rooms are still using is a second laptop and a long cable.
One honest limit: PowerPoint flattens its builds and drops its transitions on export, so a deck that depends on animation is better captured live with a window-source cue.
Convert it in place, without leaving the application, with GPU encoding where the machine has it. Importing any file also reports codec, raster, frame rate, channel count and duration, so you can see what you were actually sent. If a clip was mastered too quietly it can be normalised to EBU R128.
That is most of the reason Deckboy exists. Mitti, PlaybackPro Plus, QLab and Millumin are all macOS only, and vMix is Windows only, so the first question on a show is usually whether the software runs on the machine you brought at all. Deckboy runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux from the same show file.
Where the others still win: Mitti is the most refined cue player on a Mac, PlaybackPro has years of corporate rooms behind it, QLab owns audio-led theatre cueing, Millumin is a real projection-mapping suite, and vMix is a switcher, which Deckboy is not. There is a fuller comparison here, including where each of them beats it.
Free, GPL-3.0, no paid tier and no plan for one. No account, no licence server, no telemetry, nothing that phones home — 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.
One honest caveat: the builds are not code-signed. Signing needs paid Apple and Microsoft developer accounts the project has not bought, so both operating systems warn about an unknown developer the first time. The README has the one-time steps.
Yes. Outputs are per-display, with display-native or fixed raster modes, and each output has its own area of interest, edge feathering and warp / keystone correction — enough for ordinary multi-projector work, though it is not a projection-mapping suite.