Bitfocus Companion with Stream Deck for AV Control: What It Does Well and Where It Stops

What Companion Is

Bitfocus Companion is free, open-source software that turns an Elgato Stream Deck into a professional control surface. Press a physical key, it fires a command at a piece of equipment.

It is genuinely one of the success stories of open-source AV: 700+ modules, a community of over 15,000, and installations in studios and venues worldwide. If you work in broadcast, live production or theatre, you have almost certainly used a system running it.

Two things are worth knowing up front:

Hardware is optional. Companion ships with a Stream Deck emulator and a web page you can open on any touchscreen, so you can evaluate it — and run it — with no hardware at all. It can also be triggered externally over OSC, TCP, UDP, HTTP, WebSocket and Art-Net.

Modules run in isolated child processes. A faulty driver cannot crash the whole application. This is a genuinely good architectural decision that a lot of commercial control systems do not make.

The Module Ecosystem Is the Real Product

Every connection in Companion is a module, and most modules are written and maintained by the community. Since version 4.0 they are downloadable plugins rather than being built in.

Coverage is broadest where its community is: Blackmagic ATEM, vMix, OBS Studio, QLab, PTZ cameras, video switchers, playback software. For a live-production rack, the odds that your gear already has a module are very high.

When something is not supported, the paths are: write the module yourself, hire someone from the community forum to write it, or request it and hope.

This is the honest trade-off of a community-driven driver ecosystem. Coverage is excellent for popular broadcast gear and thinner for equipment that broadcast people never touch — which, for exhibition work, includes a lot of what is actually in the rack.

Where Companion Fits Well

• Live production and broadcast. This is its home ground and nothing here is a compromise.

• Theatre and houses of worship. Cue-driven operation with an operator present.

• A control surface for an operator who is present. The Stream Deck metaphor — a grid of labelled keys — is excellent when a trained person is sitting in front of it.

• Budget-constrained projects. It is free, and that is not a small thing.

• Anywhere you want to avoid a closed ecosystem. Being open source means the system outlives any vendor relationship.

Where the Model Runs Out

Being straight about this is more useful than pretending otherwise.

1. The interface metaphor is keys, not a floor plan.
Companion's model is a grid of buttons. An exhibition hall interface is usually a tablet showing a floor plan, device cards, and status — "this projector in this room, currently on, 42% volume". That is a different interface model, not a harder version of the same one.

2. It assumes an operator.
Companion is built around someone pressing keys. An exhibition hall runs unattended: it opens on a schedule, recovers from a power cut, and is touched by a receptionist or a docent rather than a technician. Scheduling, boot recovery and unattended state management are not what Companion is for.

3. Building-side protocols are thin.
Exhibition halls contain lighting relays, curtain motors, HVAC and power sequencers, which speak Modbus RTU/TCP, and PCs that need Wake-on-LAN. These are not broadcast equipment, so community module coverage is comparatively sparse.

4. Someone has to maintain it.
Free software is not free to operate. Modules update, Node versions move, and a system nobody owns eventually stops being updated. For a museum that will run this for eight years with no in-house AV staff, that is a real cost — one that has to be assigned to somebody at handover.

An Honest Comparison

If your project is a live production environment, use Companion. It is better at that job than we are, it costs nothing, and recommending otherwise would be dishonest.

If your project is an exhibition hall that opens itself every morning, the requirements are different enough that the comparison is not really apples to apples — you are choosing between a control surface and an unattended venue system.

The Point Worth Stealing From Companion

Regardless of which you use, Companion gets one thing very right that is worth adopting as a principle:

Isolate your drivers. Running each device module in its own process means one badly-behaved projector cannot take down the interface that controls everything else. In a hall with forty devices, that architectural decision is the difference between "one exhibit is down" and "the whole hall is down".

If you are evaluating any control system, ask what happens when one device stops responding. The answer tells you a lot.

Trying It

There is no reason not to evaluate it — it is free and needs no hardware:

• Install Companion, open the web interface

• Add a connection for a device you have

• Use the built-in emulator or the web buttons page to test

• Trigger it externally over TCP or HTTP to see how it integrates

Even if you end up using something else, an afternoon with Companion is a good way to understand what module-based control systems can and cannot do — and its documentation on protocols is a useful reference in its own right.

With SoftControl

SoftControl covers serial, TCP, UDP, HTTP, PJLink, Modbus RTU/TCP and Wake-on-LAN with a tablet-oriented interface built for halls that run unattended — scheduled opening, power-cut recovery, and an interface a non-technical operator can use.

Its licence is local and runs fully offline, which matters for the same reason open source does: the installation does not depend on a vendor's servers staying up. A delivered project keeps working regardless.

For a worked exhibition deployment see the museum control system case study, and for what unattended operation actually requires see the commissioning checklist.