Deckboy v0.85.0

Deckboy can now record what it puts to air, take audio in, and generate its own pictures and sound. Three capabilities it did not have — plus the work that turns the first one from a viewing copy into something an edit suite will accept.

Program recording

RECORD sits on the button bar in the OUTPUT group, pulses while armed, and shows the running file size. Its destination is its own setting, separate from the encode queue's.

The recording is its own standard. Raster and rate are set independently of the programme — RECFORMAT 1920x1080 59.94 off a 4K programme scales on the GPU before readback, so the recording moves a quarter of the bytes. Both default to following the input, because a recording should look like what went in unless somebody says otherwise. Rates are exact where broadcast says they are exact: 23.976 is 24000/1001, not 23.98.

Constant frame rate by construction. The file has to contain exactly rate × elapsed frames. An encoder stamps by arrival order at the declared rate, so delivering fewer frames than promised does not slow the file down — it shortens it. A twenty-second take became eight seconds and looked perfectly healthy until an editor opened it. The pacer counts what is owed, repeats the last picture to cover a gap, and if it cannot keep up it says so out loud, once a second, on the output health state and in the show log.

Timecode. Start at a value, at time of day, or at zero; drop-frame, non-drop, or auto. Auto is right by rate — DF only means anything at 29.97 and 59.94, where it skips two timecode numbers a minute (except every tenth) to keep the count against the wall clock. No picture is ever dropped. The flag is carried in the file as SMPTE intends.

Codecs a post house asked for. ProRes (LT, 422, HQ, 4444) and DNxHR (LB, SQ, HQ, HQX) alongside H.264 and HEVC, in the right container, at the right pixel format, with the right vendor tag.

Segmentation and safety. Roll to a new file every N minutes or N megabytes, with a 3.8 GB ceiling so a FAT32 card cannot silently truncate a take. On stop, a fragmented recording is remuxed into a normal MP4 — OBS's trade, and the right one: a power cut leaves a playable file, a clean stop leaves a tidy one.

It keeps up. The frame leaves the GPU through an asynchronous staging ring instead of a synchronous read that stalled the render thread for 21 ms a frame, and the control window stops taking vsync while an output is recording. Verified against a 4K programme: 2160p25, 2160p30, 2160p50, 2160p59.94, 1080p50, 1080p29.97 and ProRes HQ 1080p25 all frame-exact.

That fast path is D3D11, so macOS and Linux take the portable read. Measured rather than assumed — frame-exact at 1080p50, 1080p59.94 and 2160p25, and behind only at 4K above 30p, where the alarm fires. Record 4K at 25 or 30, or record 1080 off a 4K programme, and every platform is frame-exact.

Audio input

Microphone and line input, with device selection, gain, a clip indicator, mono folding and a settable recording bitrate. It routes to the programme, so it reaches the stream and the recording. Streaming and recording had been carrying silent audio on Windows entirely; that is fixed.

ASIO (Windows)

Vendored SDK, driver enumeration, and a real-time output callback with a ring buffer, so cue audio can reach an interface directly. A device whose sample rate does not match gets a conversion rather than a refusal. macOS and Linux continue through CoreAudio and ALSA.

The synth sources

• Tone generator — the audio counterpart of a test pattern, with diagnostic displays.
• Chip voices — 2A03 and FDS as one SYNTH section, playable from parameters rather than presets, and playable live over MIDI or the computer keyboard.
• Video synth — oscillators, mirrors and feedback, a glitch stack, hardware palettes, CRT, a text mode with the full 95-glyph ASCII set, and sprite sets from data/sprites with rotation, flip, jitter and chaos per tile. Import a sheet or a folder of sprites through a picker.

Timer

Custom colours, six chimes, a rest that is actually silent, an event logo, and message placeholders.

Also

• HAP conversion is offered where it would actually pay, with the real numbers.
• Datamosh gains an EXTREME recipe and per-cue encoder overrides.
• First launch always shows the green branded wordmark; splashes rotate per theme.
• The macOS and Linux builds are fixed. ASIO's stub file was only compiled on Windows, so those two linked against declarations with no definitions; and the recording readback sat inside the decoder's namespace, which a build without in-process decode does not compile at all. Both structural, both fixed — all three platforms now build and smoke clean in CI.

Downloads

• Windows — Deckboy-0.85.0-windows-x64.zip, portable; unzip and run.
• macOS (Apple Silicon) — Deckboy-0.85.0-macos-arm64.dmg, or the .zip of the same bundle. Built and smoke-tested in CI.
• Linux — build from source; see the README. There is no portable bundle yet.