This thing called NDI
By Jim Bask
From LinkedIn
….So what is NDI, and what makes it so special? It’s really quite simple: NDI is just a protocol to send video and audio over your network. Sort of like what your security IP camera does. There’s really nothing special about it. It’s the implementation of it that makes the difference. If you’ve ever tried to hook up an IP camera you know there are protocols that need to be considered, IP addresses (that keep changing when you don’t want them to), poor performance causing hiccups in the video, etc. It can be a nightmare. Now imagine having 20 IP cameras that all need to work perfectly, from the start, and of course fully synchronised. NDI makes all the headaches in this go away. It’s true plug & play: every NDI source added to your network will instantly show up in every NDI receiver. It’s like virtual SDI cables with a name tag. Forget IP addresses, NDI takes care of that. Forget bit rates and compression settings, NDI will find just the right balance of compression and quality to make you forget there isn’t an actual SDI cable involved. Need more cameras? Add more. After adding a few you may need to upgrade to a 10 Gb network, but that’s about as difficult as it gets. And recently these networks hardly cost more than a proper 1 Gb network. Some PCs even come standard with a 10 GbE port now. Chances are you already have the network equipment, so all you really are looking at is investing in an encoder that converts the camera signal, be it HDMI or SDI, into NDI (i.e. an ethernet port). These are currently available from both Newtek (Spark Connect) and BirdDog. There are even PTZ cameras that have built-in NDI support. Of course, by now you probably have a PC with a capture card lying around doing nothing, so why not install a (9 US$) version of VidBlasterX and turn it into the perfect NDI encoder? It even comes with diagnostics the hardware equivalents don’t offer…..read more