We thought that it would be a brilliant idea to utilize the high quality PTZ network cameras instead of more expensive Panasonic AW-HE60S cameras (or similar) for small studio applications. It would save like $2K per camera plus the 4 HDSDI I/P PCIe card, which is another $1K. When you look at a 4 camera system your savings are like $9K. Gives huge competition power to my business.

Looked into these PTZ cameras.

Canon VB-H41
Panasonic WV-SW598
Sony SNCEP580
Axis Q6045

All of the above models produce both h.264 and MJPEG streams. We know that vMix only supports h.264 streams as input so still should be fine. Worth to give it a try. Canon here has kindly lent us a demo VB-H41 for testing. It's picture quality at 16Mbps and lens performance proved that it's very usable for broadcast applications. Latency was like only 0.2 secs (@ 5 I frames / sec). Over an PoE switch it was fairly easy to get the input at vMix side. I liked the PoE thing too. No cable mess. With AW-HE60S it would have been data, video and power cables all around. Great.

However for some reason the Canon PTZ camera produces the h.264 streams only in 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 15 and 30 fps. There is no 25 fps choice for h.264 streaming. And this product is global; not only for US market. 25 fps is only available for MJPEG streams. It seems it's the same for Panasonic and Sony models as well. A 25 fps set up vMix accepts 30 fps h.264 streaming sources and then framerate converts but the results are not useable at all.

So at the end of the day the whole idea turned out to be useless. I believe only the Axis model can produce 25fps h.264 streams but haven had the chance to give it a try.

So wouldn't it be nice to have MJPEG streaming input support for this reason?

I tested this with my Sony SNC camera's and it has a good quality (especially with NDI) and almost no delay.
How can I emulate this step by software without needing an extra PC?


vMix should realy have a IP (mjpeg/jpeg) capture option for all those old IP camera users like churches.
(they often use Webcam7 Pro as Directshow filter for vMix, but it has seconds delay)
Before vMix I used Blue Iris and the IP quality was better than the video grab and almost no delay.

Adding a Web browser input in vMix and fill in the IP camera's stream URL will also work!

If it is not fullscreen it can be done with the zoom setting.

For Sony SNC camera's the URL is: http://username:password@ip.address/image