Product

Platform

web

Users

Primary — home cinema enthusiasts (product surfaces). Owners of dedicated theater rooms and projectors (JVC and similar). They own and understand an HDMI signal chain, know what HDR tone mapping and gamut mapping mean, and are chasing the best achievable picture quality. They are comfortable installing a PCIe card and routing cable. Do not dumb the material down; do not gatekeep it either.

They evaluate on a laptop or phone, but they use the product in a dark, light-controlled room — often at a distance, sometimes via remote control rather than mouse and keyboard.

Secondary — small internal team (admin surfaces). A handful of trusted operators running the back office: device fleet, licensing, release channels, beta requests, plus platform ops (jobs, users, API keys, service health, email, billing). Confirmed as a small internal team, not customers. Density, scanability, and speed matter more than onboarding or hand-holding.

Product Purpose

Void Video is a software-based video processor for home cinema. Signal comes in over HDMI from an AVR into a PCIe capture card, is processed on the GPU, and goes back out to the projector or display. It replaces or outperforms dedicated hardware video processors by doing the work in software on commodity PC hardware.

Success is picture quality the user can see on their own screen, in their own room, without a hardware box in the chain.

Positioning

Cinema-grade processing quality delivered in software on a general-purpose GPU, in a chain the user already owns. The name references the absolute black of a dedicated theater room — velvet walls, "black hole" rooms — which is both the brand and the literal quality target.

Operating Context

The signal chain is a factual part of the product and appears across marketing, docs, and the on-device UI:

Source → AVR → PCIe capture card → Void Video (GPU processing) → video card output → display/projector

Setup is four steps: install the capture card in a PCIe slot, route HDMI from the AVR to the card, install and configure the software, connect the GPU output to the display.

Documented source devices: NVIDIA Shield, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV.

The on-device web UI is operated in a dark room, and remote control and keyboard shortcuts are documented first-class input methods — not mouse-only.

Capabilities and Constraints

Confirmed feature areas, taken from the shipped documentation tree:

• Video — upscaler, downscaler, plane upscaler/downscaler, antiringing, debanding, dithering, sigmoidization, frame mixer
• HDR — tone mapping (incl. advanced), tone curves, gamut mapping (incl. advanced), transfer function, output primaries, LLDV
• SDR — transfer function, output primaries
• Warping — basic corrections, corners, edge warping, fine tuning, projector correction
• Zoom and CIH / constant-image-height aspect handling (2.39:1, 2.00:1, 1.85:1, 16:9, 4:3) with lens correction
• Display — display modes, auto refresh rate, whitelist
• System — updates
• Plugins — an extensible plugin system
• Remote control and keyboard shortcuts as primary input paths
• Theming of the on-device UI

Back-office capabilities: device registration and linking, license issuance, release channels and artifacts, hardware records, plugin distribution, beta request queue, roles. Platform ops: jobs, users, API keys, system logs, service health, email (accounts + transactional), billing integrations.

Account surfaces that exist today: login, invite signup, beta signup, email verification, forgot/reset password, profile, settings, device linking, downloads.

Undecided / not established: pricing, licensing terms as presented to customers, and public launch date.

Brand Commitments

Binding, recorded in VOID_STYLE_GUIDE.md:

• Name: Void Video.
• Logo: front-on black hole with concentric blue-purple accretion rings and a bold white "V" at center. Asset set exists (icon, full wordmark, system flow diagram, AV setup diagram, install steps graphic).
• Voice: technical but approachable. Cinema-grade without pretension — the intersection of a high-end AV forum post and a clean product page.
• Dark-only on product surfaces. Page background is never white or light.
• Typefaces: DM Sans and JetBrains Mono. Explicitly not Inter, Roboto, Arial, or system fonts. JetBrains Mono is reserved for labels, tags, captions, stats, and technical identifiers — never body text.

These commitments bind the marketing site and the on-device web UI. The internal admin surfaces are a separate visual world by decision, and are not bound by the palette above.

Evidence on Hand

Real and usable:

• The full documentation tree (guide + settings), which is genuine product depth and the strongest available proof.
• The signal-chain and install-step diagrams as real explanatory assets.
• Interactive demonstrations of three claims — HDR tone mapping (before/after), geometric correction (distorted/corrected), CIH aspect handling — implemented as canvas visuals.
• Working beta signup, invite, and download flows.

Absent — must not be fabricated. The product is pre-launch / private beta. There are no customers, no testimonials, no case studies, no press, no published benchmarks, and no public pricing. Nothing on any surface may imply otherwise. The beta waitlist is the real conversion goal, not a purchase.

Product Principles

1. Show the difference, don't assert it. This audience has seen marketing claims about picture quality and discounts them. Demonstrations and real documentation carry the argument.
2. Respect the expertise. Correct terminology, stated plainly. No dumbing down, no gatekeeping.
3. The room is dark. Product surfaces are used in a light-controlled theater. Dark is a functional requirement, not a style preference.
4. The chain is the story. Users think in signal paths; the source → capture → process → display chain is how the product explains itself.
5. Earn the beta signup honestly. Pre-launch means depth and proof of work stand in for social proof — never invent the social proof.

Accessibility & Inclusion

No product-specific standard has been established yet. Two real needs are already implied by the operating context and should be treated as requirements rather than nice-to-haves: non-pointer operation (remote control and keyboard shortcuts are documented input methods for the on-device UI), and legibility in a dark room at viewing distance.