Most people will use some video app to obtain video output on Linux. But video output is still generally steeped in mystery and viewed as a magic blackbox among the Linux community. However the Lumiera team were confronted with having to examine the magic blackbox themselves. In this talk we demonstrate several well established mechanisms that can be used to display video frames from a Linux desktop application. We explain the technical prerequisites to display video frames, discuss the challenges and we show some widely available technologies used to implement video display. Lumiera is a video editing application under development in C++ — which we use here to illustrate how raw video output is at the heart of a video processing render engine.