NDI HX w/ Andrew Cross
In this live stream, we speak with Andrew Cross, CTO of NewTek, all about NDI 3.0. We have gathered questions from the most pertinent Facebook User Groups, Twitter and YouTube channels to prepare ourselves to get answers about NDI. NDI-HX is the newest high efficiency, low latency additional to NDI. We learn all about this new protocol from the lead engineer himself and through the following agenda uncover the power of Video Production over IP.
Agenda:
1. NDI 3.0
2. Multicast
3. NDI | HX
4. Wireless NDI
5. Bandwidth
6. PTZ Camera Control
7. New Tools – (Teasers)
8. The Future
NDI 3.0 Update
NDI 3.0 Update
Since the release of NDI 2.0, NewTek has been working on a bunch of user request along with some large over-arching goals to broaden the effective reach and usability for the IP standard. Dr. Cross mentions in our interview that “NDI has been adopted far quicker than they had originally anticipated” confirming the large demand for IP video production from companies such as xSplit, vMix, Wirecast, LiveStream Studio, StreamStar and now PTZOptics and 10 other NDI-HX manufacturers which will touch on further in this blog post. “100’s of software applications are using NDI 1.0 or 2.0 yet, the hardware manufacturers have been largely left behind.”
One of the largest updates for NDI 3.0 is the multicast functionality allowing large number live video viewers to connect to NDI sources without adding additional bandwidth per stream like unicast. Not only with NDI 3.0 include efficiency improvements for IP video transmission in high 4k resolutions but it allows for overall video production bandwidths to be reduced an Ethernet based LAN (Local Area Network). Once multicast is enabled on your on your network Andrew mentions remembering to turn on “IGMP snooping on your router” when setting up your network. Dr. Cross explains how 200 MBps 4K video can crash your network on a Gigabit switch without multicast enabled. “A lot of routers treat multicast traffic as if it was broadcast traffic.”
“…you could be producing a 4k resolution stream on NDI and you could distribute it to your whole company with a hundred viewers at once… you’d get basically perfect quality video, incredibly low latency you know to unlimited number of viewers.”
Don’t forget to learn about IGMP
Here is a Wikipedia Snippeton IGMP:
The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IPv4 networks to establish multicast group memberships. IGMP is an integral part of IP multicast. IGMP can be used for one-to-many networking applications such as online streaming video and gaming, and allows more efficient use of resources when supporting these types of applications. IGMP is used on IPv4 networks. Multicast management on IPv6 networks is handled by Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) which is a part of ICMPv6 in contrast to IGMP’s bare IP encapsulation.
The number one thing that you need to make multicast work on any network is, you must enable something called IGMP snooping on the router… without that multicast flat-out does not work and if you put a high bandwidth like full NDI on to that network it’ll probably cause all manner of grief becausea lot of routers treat multicast traffic like its broadcast traffic… get your network fully configured for multicast.
NDI HX
NDI HX
NDI HX will open up compatibility with over 10 new hardware products building hardware solutions for live streaming and broadcast with built-in NDI support. It’s not a regular RTMP stream as many had mentioned in our Facebook Group discussion about NDI HX. It does use onboard h.264 compression chips, but they use a very high bit-rate to ensure the highest quality at the lowest latency. There are a lot of piece to the customization of the PTZOptics camera chipset with an NDI firmware update to ensure a reliable low-latency streaming to the Network Device Interface connection.
The things that we can take advantage of that there others couldn’t so, for instance, and you know I’m really getting into the details here we can run with an incredibly long group of pictures. So, we don’t need iframes, we don’t; we know when we’re connecting and not connecting and so we get control over how the stream is being produced. That wouldn’t normally be the case and so we can do some things to get much better bandwidth than one might possibly norm imagine. -Dr. Cross
NDI will standardize the world of PTZ control? VISCA protocols, Panasonic Protocols, with no need to configure separately.
Wireless NDI
Wireless NDI
The world at large is moving toward mobile devices using wireless networks. “We have worked hard to make NDI easy to use in the mobile world. You can use our iOS app with NDI but…” mentioned Dr. Cross, the NDI HX libraries we have available today would have made the experience even smoother on mobile devices. NDI HX allows us to use encoders inside devices which are often low power. The NDI Connect Spark firmware uses full multicast NDI even over a wireless network which means you can have as many connected devices as you want. With multicast, you can send NDI video sources to a huge number of people at once “even when you are using vMix as you are. It all works and it looks great.”
General the goal from NewTek is to make NDI HX work over any wireless WAP (Wireless Access Point). The “NewTek philosophy” is all about enabling everyone to join the live video over IP revolution. “Obviously some routers are going to do better than others” but in general Dr. Cross explains NewTek would like NDI to have options to run on almost any Gigabit router in existence and he would consider it a bug if it did not work properly.
“in regards to wireless routers and certifying routers. Generally, our goal is for NDI is for it to work in the real world and I kind of feel like it’s a failure on our behalf. If we don’t work on every common device and there’s not some way to what make it work. So, we if there’s not some way to make it work. We would probably consider it a bug and we would try to do something about on our end. I feel like we have somewhat lost the philosophy of NDI when we’re needing to certify routers. Our goal is to make IP video accessible to people. So, I mean that’s our philosophy and honestly if somebody called us up and said this router just will not work as long as the router wasn’t busted and everything had been done on the settings that could we would devote serious time to trying to make it work” – Dr. Cross
NDI HX Bandwidth
NDI HX Bandwidth
It’s important to know that NDI and NDI HX sources will have much different bandwidth uses. The “HX” in NDI HX standard for “NDI High Efficiency”, which runs in the neighborhood of 10 MBps for 1080p video. The bandwidth cannot be directly compared to streaming at 10 Mbps because, for instance, NDI can run with an incredibly long run of pictures and therefore does need I-frame because NDI knows exactly when they are connecting to a stream. NDI, therefore, has control over the stream and provide much better bandwidth to quality than one would normally find with RTSP or h.264 compression.
NDI Camera Controls for PTZ
PTZ Camera Control via NDI
It was great to hear NewTek will helping the world standard on PTZ controls via their IP camera control protocol. The difficulties as explained by Dr. Cross involves the various protocols used by SONY, Panasonic, PTZOptics and others. By standardizing PTZ camera controls inside the NewTek NDI, Dr. Cross will effectively be helping all NDI software users the ability to connect to cameras with a single NDI connection. This will help increase broadcast PTZ camera adoption in live streaming video production by making camera deployments easier and. We want to build a PTZ camera when you only have to plug in a single Ethernet cable into the network switch and that would provide complete audio, video and camera controls. NDI HX builds PTZ, camera control, tally, audio and video into a single real-workflow.
NDI is gonning to help standardize PTZ control…. … one cable [Ethernet] can provide, power to the cameras [Power Over Ethernet], video, audio and tally, over NDI HX – Dr. Cross
New NDI 3.0 Tools
NDI Studio Monitor
The big improvements for the NDI 3.0 now include a Studio Monitor which is the improved NDI Video Monitor. One of the new features includes overlaid PTZ controls which will also integrate options for USB joystick control. The scan converter works better and the test generator includes options for custom image integration for logos. It’s been over a year’s worth of work which includes a bunch of new details. The picture below shows our PTZ Xbox controller we can now use with the NDI Studio Monitor.
PTZ xbox controller
Learn more about the NewTek NDI for live streaming PTZ Cameras
Video Transcript:
Paul Richards: Hello everybody, welcome to PTZOptics live we’ve been having
Dr. Andrew Cross It’s my pleasure its way more fun this way.
Paul Richards: So we’re going to jump right into the interview here. I’m going toassume that our viewers out there watching this live or on demand knows a little bit about NDI. So, we’re going to kind of there’ll be more a little bit more technical I think. So, let’s just go ahead and star off with NDI 3.0. Can you tell us; what get us up to speeds I think a lot of us know what NDI is but 3.0 I think it’s a new kind of thing that we’d like to hear more about.
Dr. Andrew Cross Okay, so NDI 3.0 we’ve actually introduced a probably some of the biggest steps yet in NDI. Now, a kind of the probably the number one at least today marketing level is going to be that we support multicast on NDI now. Which means that if you want you could be producing a 4k resolution stream on NDI and you could distribute it to your whole company with a hundred viewers at once, 200 viewers at once, you’d get basically perfect quality video, incredibly low latency you know to unlimited number of viewers. Now, I should caution the multicast in the real world take some actual setup. It’s our experience has been that when we first switch this on. We managed to bring our whole network down and our key gaze guys came you know hunting me down to ask me what on earth we were doing and it turns out you have to configure your routers properly for multicast. But once you do it, it works awesome and so you can obviously you can, this mean that any sender; NDI sender can send to an unlimited number of people. Now, we’ve not just on that we’ve improved the way metadata works.
Dr. Andrew Cross We’ve improved the way timing works, we’ve had it much better in NDI tools and of course we’ve introduced NDI | HX. Which in many ways is the is the holy grail because since NDI’s as come out since everybody’s accepted that the world has been moving to IP, because we know there’s been no really practical way to actually get real-world cameras that exist today actually working with IP. So, everybody kind of thinks well it’s gonna come and every trade show they come say okay. So, okay me yet it’s for a camera yet and so we came up with this concept of NDI | HX. Which was to make it so that it is easy to integrate devices into NDI and so that’s obviously a very big thing and we’ve worked you know ourselves and with you PTZ optics to help start bringing real world. You know real world devices into NDI and if anything that’s the biggest thing because to me when we came out with NDI 3.0 or 1.0 oh that was three years ago. We you know we all knew where the industry was going and I think that there was this huge buzz around NDI.
Dr. Andrew Cross NDI it got integrated very quickly, far quicker than I ever expected into hundreds of applications and yet it did all the stuff and it was like this there’s all this energy on this side and then you have kind of cameras where everybody knows that they do IP. They are all digital these days and yet the two worlds never came together and it was always going to be the magic of when those two worlds came together that really jump-started the IP revolution and so that is you know what NDI HX is meant to do. Which is kind of a bridge between real world devices and NDI and so you know that those are the some of the big things in in NDI with obviously with we’ve kind of gone one step further and we’ve standardized the way PTZ control works. That means that you know if you think about how PTZ is traditionally worked you’ve had a camera then you’ve connected that your computer somehow probably HDMI or SDI (Serial Digital Interface) , you have then needed to work out separately how to get tally back to it, you’ve had to work out separately helps you bring the audio probably by analog maybe it was on the SDI (Serial Digital Interface) embedded. Then you’re gonna work out okay it’s running this core it’s running, the Panasonic protocol or what protocol? What the IP address is? And so you put all of this stuff together and it’s incredibly complicated and so we’ve actually built into NDI. This concept where you connect your application to the camera and now every part of how they talk works. So, that the PTZ can just works you don’t need to configure that separately. It doesn’t matter what’s the cameras protocol is, it will work you know with them as long as they support checks and so with we’ve really solved a huge part of getting you know of setting these things up and making them truly plug-and-play. So, that that’s been the goal you know I’m sure there’s gonna be some things we’re gonna learn as we put this out in the real world but that’s been our goal.
Paul Richards: Well, I think NDI HX is what we’ve all kind of been waiting for because we’ve had these cameras and it’s been difficult to integrate NDI in and we couldn’t really have a shIP date and now. So, you explained to me what did NDI | HX do for those of us out there like is it different from true NDI or is there like a sacrifice that’s being made? I know that what I’m seeing is great quality but I’m assuming that maybe more compression like I just don’t know a lot too much about it but the quality looks great and the latency is really, really low. So, what kind of magic are you working here to make this all happen?
Dr. Andrew Cross Well, so NDI | HX the basic, so NDI HX what we’ve done is we’ve said you know we a big part of this is we’ve said we need to we’re going to work with specific you know with some small number of important vendors of which PTZOptics to one to collaborate on starting to get devices to market. So, at this point every device in order to get to low latency, high quality, automatically discovered, full PTZ control, all of those pieces you know our goal is how can we make NDI HX work with a camera that exists today and so we’re working with as many companies as we can and focusing on it you know the really important ones first on collaborating on getting those two pieces working together. And so yes I mean it requires us to sit and tweak and I know that you know like with yourselves we’ve had changes made to the firmware. So, that it can all work with you know with compact you said okay how and I’ll get with this problem? How on earth do we get this to work? And by you know by working together we’ve actually managed to take you know really with it. I often use this term in engineering at new tape.
Dr. Andrew Cross Which is Mars rover engineering and they you know the what I say is no NASA sent this Rover to Mars and they say they send it off five years ago and somehow they have to make it do things that they had never considered that it would do. And that’s what we’re trying to solve here by working closely with partners like yourselves. Where we you know we’re sitting again we’re getting together and we started talking to you about this well over a year ago about how we can take the; what’s in your hardware today? How we can customize it to solve some of the things that makes it not work with NDI and then we can put all of this together and manage to make it work within NDI. So, that’s a very complicated may be technical you know decision but you know to answer or the technical discussion to answer your question yes it uses different compression but we have worked around so it knows with your cameras. Your cameras have h.264 encoders but we’re running high, high bitrate h.264. We’re not running you know low bitrate streaming h.264. So, this means that we can work with in encodes that exists today for instance and it is customized so that you know that there were firmware changes that you’ve made. That allows us to; it’s not just a regular stream we’re doing some clever things on top of that, to manage to get to very low latency, to get to very high quality and to make it actually integrate and work well with you, you know there’s a lot of pieces to putting this together reliably.
Paul Richards: We have a question about bandwidth which I’ll ask you when we get to that but one of the things that I think a lot of people are excited about and I put on the agenda is Wireless NDI. How have you made that possible you even in the pre-show we’re talking about multicast enabled WiFi routers. So, we can actually take our traditionally what I always thought of as NDI as Local Area Network (LAN) , hard wired, a hundred megabits but now it sounds like we can do this over WiFi. So, it’s kind of a big change for is this an NDI 3.0 thing that’s kind of new?
Dr. Andrew Cross Yes! Huff I mean we made first little baby steps that direction in
NDI 2.0 and if you go and look back at the press release, for instance, we have talked a lot about mobile and a big part of this is this realization that much as I think a lot of us come from the desktop world and in the broadcast industry. We’re tending to talk about you know what we’ve been used to for 20 years but the world at large is moving too what’s wireless and it’s moving towards mobile devices and it’s moving towards you know low-power portable devices. And you know we started well over a year ago, working on making NDI so that it can integrate into that world and obviously the; so you can use our iPhone application today and it works okay. I mean it worked as well as we could make it a year and a half ago, with ever think we’ve done with NDI HX, which allows us to use basically encoders built into hardware devices that are low-power. We can do an awful lot better than that and then when you’re talking about things like our spark connect spark product. Where we really have customized the firmware on that device completely, I mean it is not the traditional way you would typically do these things we’ve got right the way up to doing full multicast. You know full multicast NDI over wireless which means they even on a wireless network you could have really as many devices connected and listening as you want and you know even though we are running what is probably considered relatively high bandwidth here. Because we can do this multicast obviously you can still send to a huge number of people at once and you it doesn’t matter if you have you know video monitors on different computers. You’re bringing it into vMix like you are somewhere else it all works and it looks great of course.
Paul Richards: Well, that’s incredible and I think there’s a lot of questions that guys were like you have to ask, one of the things Gary Boutin said you got to ask him. He thinks that we should you guys should probably certify WiFi routers because people are gonna want to put these you know connect sparks everywhere and they might not have a multicast enabled WiFi router or they might not have a WiFi router that can handle all the bandwidth. So, that was one of the suggestions our engineers said is ruckus wireless is a very high-quality wireless router company that is kind of built for video would that be. Do you have any suggestions there?
Dr. Andrew Cross Yes! Well, so, first of all, I want to throw a term out there since a lot of people are starting to think about this. The number one thing that you need to make multicast work on any network is, you must enable something called IGMP spoofing I think. Oh! Sorry IGMP snip; snooping on the router without that multicast flat-out does not work and if you put a high bandwidth like full NDI on to that network it’ll probably cause all manner of grief because basically a lot of routers treat multicast traffic like its broadcast traffic. So, the very first version we got NDI; NDI, full NDI running with multicast we switched it on and suddenly our whole network came down because we have over 200 computers and we were sending while it was 4k resolution. So, we were sending 200 megabits of class to 200 computers at once and needless to say quickly the IT guy came running over and so we had to go back and work out how to get you know our network fully configured for multicast but in regards to wireless routers and certifying routers. Generally, our goal is for NDI is for it to work in the real world and I kind of feel like it’s a failure on our behalf.
Dr. Andrew Cross If we don’t work on every common device and there’s not some way to what make it work. So, we if there’s not some way to make it work. We would probably consider it a bug and we would try to do something about on our end. I feel like we have somewhat lost the philosophy of NDI when we’re needing to certify routers. Our goal is to make IP video accessible to people. So, I mean that’s our philosophy and honestly, if somebody called us up and said this router just will not work as long as the router wasn’t busted and everything had been done on the settings that could we would devote serious time to trying to make it work. And maybe at some point we would give up but our philosophy is we gotta try to make it work because you know the IP revolution is about enabling everybody to use IP. Now, after all that I said obviously some routers are gonna do better than others and I would strongly recommend that people do pay attention to this and so you know really the right answer is always going to be get people to use the best equipment you possibly can. But at the same time, us on our end we need to do everything we can to make sure that all equipment works and so if you combine those two things hopefully everybody gets good experience.
Paul Richards: Well, that is really good to hear I know that I’ve there are huge differences in gigabit switches you know you can buy one from Cisco and you can buy one from China and they’re quite different but let’s go to our next question about bandwidth. You mentioned a 4k resolution stream you know at 200 megabits we’re through what I’ve heard through the grapevine is that NDI | HX testing has been really, really low latency. You know 30 to 50 megabits per second or sorry 30 to 50 milliseconds of latency; (yes). Which is extremely low but what I’ve heard is about 10 megabits per second of bandwidth would you say that’s correct or are you saying that maybe it’s the same as a normal NDI stream? Or where does NDI HX fall in terms of bandwidth?
Dr. Andrew Cross Okay so NDI HX I mean the HX it stands for high efficiency don’t ask me how E became X but it sounds cooler to say HX but. It stands for NDI high efficiency and so it does run low bandwidth it runs in the range of 10 megabits but it but as I’ve said what we’ve done is we’re working specifically with the important vendors like yourselves to start with and you know most importantly because we’re you know at this point we’re still customizing HX to work really well with every device that we support and so I don’t want to promise that the bandwidth is always going to be exactly the same because we want to make sure that the video quality looks great. But it is in the ballpark what we have typically found this at about 10 megabits and maybe slightly above is the point at which it looks as good as I mean it’s imperceivable and even in just terrible footage. That is the point that we that we get to and I should say it don’t you can’t directly compare this maybe with say streaming at 10 megabits because we are we’re doing things that aren’t the same as streaming. The things that we can take advantage of that there others couldn’t so, for instance, and you know I’m really getting into the details here we can run with an incredibly long group of pictures. So, we don’t need iframes, we don’t; we know when we’re connecting and not connecting and so we get control over how the stream is being produced. That wouldn’t normally be the case and so we can do some things to get much better bandwidth than one might possibly norm imagine. Hopefully, (no) it works really, really well.
Paul Richards: And the latency is really I feel like that’s was there seems to be like the huge hurdle that you’ve overcome and that’s the biggest thing with this you know Local Area Network (LAN) . Are we used to do our RTSP streaming with our cameras and trying to match video and audio and in the world of IP, if it’s not easy enough for the common user, if it doesn’t work on their gigabit switch? I was just talking to Rutgers University they have two thousand Gigabit switches deployed all up and down the East Coast and they’re all connected via fiber and everything and it’s a gigabit switch. It’s not five gigabits, not ten gigabits so they have to be very careful about how much bandwidth they use. So, it’s great to hear that it works on a gigabit switch. Let’s talk about PTZ control so you mentioned that you’re gonna NDI is gonna basically help standardize control for those of you who might be picking up this up. So, it seems like one cable can do power to the cameras, video over NDI HX and now you’re saying PTZ control can you explain what that’s gonna look like? And then what that’ll mean for a Wirecast user or vMix user, a Livestream user or a TriCaster user?
Dr. Andrew Cross Yes! So, first of all, I should say that a problem that us software companies have faced is that every camera from every vendor is different to support. So, you know if you’re like us try and support a wide variety of cameras you, you know you have to support Visco, you have to support Panasonic, you have to support I mean there’s probably five or six different protocols. Then on top of that every camera tends to have different settings. So, to get a particular camera to work even if it says you’ve controlling say a lumens camera or a Sony camera on a VISCA protocol are totally different because they have different ranges of settings. They perform differently and so every camera been different which means that getting PTZ control in software reliably means that you pretty much have to develop the software for every camera separately. So, now think you know Phoenix needs to it, why Cass need to it, new tech needs to it, hey everybody is needing to do this separately and it makes for a world in which PTZ is just pretty hit and miss and pretty hard for you know somebody buys a PTZ camera and it often involves a lot of back-and-forth between them and the customer and between the vendor and the customer and then the offer of the device is actually doing the controlling. I mean there’s just this it’s very difficult to make work. So, what we tried to do is we’re trying to standardize this so that in NDI in the SDK when you say okay. I’m going to connect to this camera what you get told is you get told by the SDK yes! This is a PTZ camera, I support PTZ control and then you can just tell the SDK okay. Pan to this position and irrespective of what camera type it is. It will painter that position and so you no longer need to worry about how you talked it. Where the protocol is how what the IP address is? Or the port number, none of that you just connect to the camera you’re receiving the video or the audio feed and we will direct and correctly change the; that we will fully support making sure that camera can be controlled without any regard by the developer. As to how to control that camera and that is a kind of the Holy Grail here for certainly on the development side for broad PTZ adoption.
Paul Richards: Yeah! That’s such a huge value add for you know anyone at adding NDI. Which I’m just so glad you’re adding that in because you know normally they would be adding it just for the low latency video or you know just for all I guess all the things. I guess it becomes all of these things that you’re doing makes it just more and more valuable for people to use.
Dr. Andrew Cross Well I mean we want I mean literally you and I started talking about this probably a year and a half ago and I remember us talking and our goal was we want you to be able to take camera, plug it in to the network and now it’s available you don’t you know there was never the goal shouldn’t be that you need to work out what the PC protocol is or which port it’s connected on or what the daisy-chaining idea is or you know what kind of port number and compression. I mean there is not what is going to enable people to use video. Are is going to enabled people to use video is it should be as simple as taking your camera and plug you into an SDI connection but that should be on the network and it should configure completely automatically just show up as available and you know that is what we’re doing and I think that NDI HX get really does get us there. And it builds you know PTZ control into that and tally into that and audio into that and so hopefully, it does more than. It’s not just about the protocol anymore we’re talking about something that actually has real workflow advantages. But really there is never been the case that you could do that with a camera. So, hopefully, that’s where we get to and if it’s not we’ll continue working on it but that is where we’re going guaranteed.
Paul Richards: Awesome and I want to get to a QA hopefully test we have a real Chat.
Tess Protesto: Yes
Paul Richards: So, remember our Q&A is the last thing I wanted to ask you is. So, with is NDI 3.0 gonna come with additional tools because I know you have some great NDI tools that have been released. Some of them like the video monitor; the NDI video monitor it works so great on all these devices
Tess Protesto: NDI mobile app soon I don’t know if that’s other than that.
Dr. Andrew Cross Well, I can answer on the tools because we’ve actually made big improvements and see you know so things, like we’re now calling the video monitor application, is now called studio monitor because it’s got so many new capabilities that we gave it a new name. I’ll give you one that this is the first place it’s is ever been mentioned actually which is that we have if you hook up a PTZ camera to I mean in video monitor you can pull up a PTZ cameras. They’re just like any other NDI source you will see an overlay that allows you to do the PTZ control but if you have any joystick of kind connected to that computer you’ll be able to move just move your camera around you know with a joystick. This is pretty cool I mean if you just think about a production it means that you can have a second operator sitting on a laptop looking at the output of the camera. They can now control it with a joystick that’s pretty cool. We’ve I mean we’ve made a lot of improvements you know the scan converter works better with the; what was a relatively mundane tool before which was our test signal generator. Now allows you to put your own patents in there and things like that. So, you can have your own images that you use in a show easily accessible, got you know I mean the thing is we’ve done it years’ worth of work and it’s a lot. Probably, a lot of its little details but man those little details add up to big changes after a year.
Paul Richards: So, like an xbox, like a wireless Xbox controller, a USB controller something like that, that would work.
Dr. Andrew Cross Yeah absolutely! That’s exactly what I tested it with
Tess Protesto: It’s like (crosstalk 22:52) we just bought one.
Paul Richards: We just bought one
Tess Protesto: Great we are going to play with it soon
Paul Richards: Oh my gosh! We’re getting through this feels
Dr. Andrew Cross That’s a lot of fun
Paul Richards: This feel good alright how to get through a rocky start of a live show. I’m gonna roll the credits (persevere) and we will jump into live show Q&A.
Q&A Time
In the post show, we answer questions from our audience all about the NewTek NDI 3.0 and features that Dr. Cross is in the process of implementing. We cover Wireless NDI, NDI Bandwidth, HDR, Mobile Devices and much more.
Questions from Facebook:
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- Bandwidth – Will NDI and NDI HX have different bandwidth?
- 90-100 MBps – Standard?
- Lower Bandwidth options?
- Bandwidth – Will NDI and NDI HX have different bandwidth?
- Adaptability? Variable data rate?
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- Real data rates involved with HDI|HX?
- Network Suggested Headroom?
- Minimum requirement for NDI 3.0 and NDI|HX
- Compare & contrast NDI|HX with RTSP
- Real, expected latency involved with HDI|HX?
- Maximum distance for Spark
- Recommended WAP? (Ruckus Wireless)
- MultiCast over WiFi?
- This is Gary Bettan’s question – Immediate certification for WiFi routers…. It shouldn’t be a trial and error for customers. There should be a cookbook explaining how to use the recommended routers.
- NDI with PTZ
- Low Bandwidth preview
- HDR Support?
- Is the 3.0 SDK preferred over v2? If changing to 3 should I see any differences in my application?
- Birddog vs Spark – Are they offering an identical features.
- iOS support for receive video function. They are already on version 3 and still no support for iOS.
- Support for Android?
- There seems to be some frustration with NewTek charging upgrade fees to access NDI when most software companies like Wirecast, Livestream, xSplit, vMix have included the integration for free.
How many HD NDI signals can work on a single gigabit network?
NDI Compression and Gigabit signals
Using full NDI, whether it’s NDI 1.0 or NDI 3.0 the bandwidth will maintain stable at roughly 100MBps. Therefore you can safely have six or seven NDI sources running on the network leaving roughly 30-40& network traffic headroom. Dr. Cross also mentioned the ability to add a second NIC (Network Interface Controller) card you can double the amount of bandwidth a. NDI supports multiple NIC cards which allow users to get twice as many streams. With NDI 3.0 the bitrate is still same as NDI 2.0 but the compression has been improved which is specifically noticeable in 4K video.
