Open tools for live events, broadcast & theatre
Stoatworks Labs is a working AV technician building the tools that should already exist — frequency coordination that speaks every format, switcher fleets you configure all at once, a cue player that costs nothing. Free, open source, and shipped from the same road cases you use.
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122 open-source projects across audio, video, RF, content and show control. Filter by discipline, sort how you like, and go straight to the repo.
Browse the software02
Five open boards for the gaps nobody fills: a daisy-chained DMX node, an IP and USB to CAN bus converter for d&b systems, a video mainframe, an FPGA mixing console, and a 10G repeater in a coupler shell.
See the boards03
Managed event content on Nextcloud, and a DIT offload workflow that gets ISO recordings off the switcher and into the edit while the session is still running.
What we run04
One AV technician, a laptop in a road case, and a long list of problems that only ever get solved at 02:00. Here is how the work actually gets made.
The short versionStoatworks Burrow v0.2.5
Most of the video plugins ship in two or three formats — FFGL for Resolume, OpenFX for Resolve, a build for After Effects — and each format goes in a different folder, in a different place on each platform. Installing one by hand means finding the project page, picking the right archive out of six, and knowing where it goes. Noticing that a new version happened is a job of its own.
Burrow is one searchable list of the lot instead: what you have installed, what has an update waiting, and one click to take it, in whichever formats you actually use.
You never have to use it. Every plugin, tool and module stays a plain download — from its own page here on the site, and from its release on GitHub, exactly as before. Nothing moves behind Burrow, and nothing ever will. It only saves you doing it by hand.
It is also new. v0.2.5 is a beta: no plugin has yet been installed into a running Resolume, Resolve or After Effects through it, and on Windows it does the FFGL plugins but not yet OpenFX or After Effects. Meet it on a machine where a broken plugin folder would cost you nothing, not on a show day.
A modern control surface for Analog Way Midra and LiveCore series video processors. Its Workspace puts sources, every screen and memories on one window-filling page — build in program, preview or both at once — backed by a graphical layer editor, memories, takes, a multiviewer/confidence-output designer, EDID writer and a full variable inspector.
Master control for a presentation room: a real-time NDI video matrix router, layered scene compositor, presenter-notes hub, and a Control Surface with a JSON-RPC automation API.
A platform-independent audio cue player for theatre and live events — cues, fades, links, loops and vamps, with a per-cue output routing matrix. Driven by OSC, MIDI, MSC, MMC, Art-Net or sACN.
A broadcast-router-style crosspoint for SRT: any number of inputs and outputs, each output live-switchable to one source, added and removed at runtime from a web UI. Pure relay, no transcode. NDI transport included.
Renders any web page offscreen through Chromium at a broadcast raster and rate, then sends it to DeckLink and AJA over SDI, to the network as NDI, OMT and RTMP/SRT, into Resolume or TouchDesigner over Syphon and Spout, and fullscreen to a GPU-attached display — every output taking the same frame. It can run several such pipelines at once, each with its own browser, clock and raster, so a page that hangs on one feed cannot touch the others. The engine clocks the browser one frame at a time rather than letting it paint on its own timer, so 50 ticks a second really is 50 paints. Settings, live diagnostics and an interactive preview are all in the browser, so a rack machine needs nothing but an HTTP port.
A multitrack recorder that runs entirely in a browser tab. Choose an audio interface and it gives you one track per input, mapped 1:1, streamed straight to a folder on disk as mono WAVs. A continuous pre-roll buffer holds every input as it arrives, so pressing record puts the previous 30 seconds at the head of the take. When a disk stalls, the frames it lost are padded with silence and written into the take's manifest, so a gap costs content and never time — and a generated test signal proves the whole chain without an interface, with a 1 kHz reference at exactly -18 dBFS.
Short videos, one per tool. Everything on screen is the real application running its real demo data — nothing is mocked up or reconstructed in a design tool. The same cuts go up on Instagram.
Support us
We use AI heavily and say so openly — it is why one technician can ship this much. It does not make the work free. Every project still costs hardware, subscriptions, test rigs and a great many unpaid hours.
