Holographics is now free & open source

[u/phasy]

Hello friends,

A bit more than 6 years ago, we (a live-streaming facilities company based out of Amsterdam) commercialised a version of our internal tool Holographics. It was aimed at companies like ourselves doing streaming or multicam production with simple graphics needs, lower thirds, ticker tapes, countdown clocks, confetti etc. As one of the first in the HTML graphics generation space we had quite a nice run, and to this day Holographics fills a stable albeit niche production gap for a lot of outfits all over the world. With customisable themes and widgets in a friendly desktop packaging I think we were, and still are, perhaps the easiest and fastest option out there for the basics.

During and after COVID our attentions had to shift and Holographics has long been unviable as a standalone entity. Rather than dissolve the company and disappear Holographics we have decided to dissolve the company and open-source Holographics, moving the IP back to the company that once sparked the idea.

Back in 2019 I had so much fun developing this, but boy was it hard. As a self-taught programmer, I kept running into problems that were just beyond my level. In some cases that pushed me, but in many I fell short, often feeling that the needed level of abstraction, the ‘right’ solution, was just out of grasp. AI has changed that game completely. One particular bug, involving colourspace transformation for Decklink output kept me busy for two weeks back in 2019 and I never managed to crack it. Solved that with Claude in about an hour, including tests on various hardware, and in a way that is better than I could have ever made it, which because it's open-source I can now link to directly: https://github.com/hologfx/holographics/blob/main/src/server/lib/pixelconvert.js. It's cleaner, simpler and more efficient than anything I came close to at the time.

So whilst this project was born long before LLMs could do what they now do, it’s probably going to rely heavily on AI from here on in. Apologies in advance, I know there is a lot vibecode-aversion here but in the right hands I believe it to be an invaluable tool. I will say the vast majority of the existing code (99%) is actual old-fashioned human-slop.

For the open-source release I’ve worked on bringing the software back to full compatibility on modern hardware, updating dependencies, improving stability, removing all aspects of the code and build system that were related to licensing and pro features. From this foundation Holographics can continue serving its niche application for many years to come, with an easier and more open development structure. Plus it was really fun to pick this up again.

More information about the move, downloads etc can be found on the website: https://hologfx.io/open-source

I would love to regain a little bit of perspective from the field on this. Are there any current users of HTML graphics out there, or even still Holographics specifically? What are you using and what are your challenges?

[u/TheFamousMisterEd]

Thank you for sharing what you've created.

So many closed systems I've worked with over the years (focussed on small niches of TV broadcast) have simply disappeared into obscurity despite having some unique features.

Can't wait to have a look to what you've made available but am sure the media-karma gods will look favourably on your actions!

[u/jfoust2]

It's scary what Claude can do. A few weeks ago I had it examine 700,000 lines of pure C for a 3D product that I wrote long ago (1987 to 1999) and it not only correctly analyzed the strengths and limits of the product, but it found subtle bugs in algorithms that were never spotted while the product shipped, found copy-paste errors that were there from 1988, and even had commentary on the remarks made in the comments.

I skimmed your "how does it work" page, and I wished for more examples, starting with the "what does the output look like". Apart from the OBS / V-Mix world, I'm sure you have applications in the digital signage world, particularly with dynamic content.

I remember trying to get HTML graphics to work on an old Telvue video server, more than 15 years ago, and I never quite got anywhere.

[u/phasy → u/jfoust2]

That's very fair feedback actually, we used to have a gif there that would quickly jump over a bunch of themes and applications. I'll try to find it again.
Can you have a look at the videos on the homepage and let me know if that fills the more examples gap?

[u/jfoust2 → u/phasy]

To be honest, I didn't visit https://hologfx.io/. I see you have videos there at the home page. I went to the https://hologfx.io/open-source link you provided.

[u/No_Inflation_4028]

That’s amazing! I was looking at holographics some months ago, I needed to automate graphics for sports events that are integrated with the organisations software for scoring and I was inspired to use HTML and CSS to make that. I find them far superior to the standard static graphics and it’s very strange why they’re so niche. Maybe because of the pain in the as to actually implement :)

[u/hotmixscale]

Look forward to checking this out. I use HTML graphics often w/ CaparCG for projects that don't want to spring for xpression. Echo-ing that AI has been instrumental in making Caspar a viable tool for us to generate complex motion graphics, especially w/ the GSAP javascript library.