I have a venue that wants to stream a live event to displays around the building complex. I would prefer to have the displays (PCs connected to the displays to connect directly to the vMix for the live stream.) I have seen others discussing a desire for multicast. Has anyone found a solution for this?

Another idea was to install a trial version of vMix on each of the PCs connected to the displays and use NDI to pull the output from my main vMix. Is this a viable option?

The third option I was thinking was to install an RTSP server on another machine as the target and then point the PCs to the server. Has someone done something like this? What exactly did you do?

The venue is a brand new venue and they are not allowing me to run cables through doorways, etc. Distances are also quite long.

If someone has any other ideas, I would appreciate a tip.

Thank!

They want at least 4 locations. One is in another building on the same campus.

I tested it out. had to play with the Windows Firewall settings but it is working great over network. There is a block on connections to vMix on the Public firewall setting. Can either reclassify the network connection on vMix machine or remove the block and only allow connections to specific IP address to the vMix application.

Thanks kJones, for getting me going in the right direction.

Well I got a solution that is working with NDI.

Background
Here is what worked for me.
The school wanted 4 TVs displaying a live feed of an all day event located in multiple locations and a couple of buildings.
They did not want cables running through the halls and originally wanted to run this over WiFi and streamed to and from YouTube. I was resistant to use stream to the internet and back with a live feed. I have had issues before with streaming when I don't control the network. it was suggested from this thread to use NDI as an options. I tested on my own network and it worked fine once I adjusted the firewall on the vmix source. I was event able to have a 1080 feed running on a 6 gen i7 wirelessly.

Venue Network
The network consisted of Cisco network gigabit switches with 10G fiber up-links to a central Cisco core. Wireless was a Cisco Miraki network.

Testing at Venue
When I got to the venue for testing, it was hit an miss on connecting and the FHD video was dropping frames. It also seemed that if I disconnected from the source in NDI Video Monitor, it sometimes would not reconnect and often would not even show the source again. I convinced the venue to connect their laptops connected to the TVs over an Ethernet cable. We still had issues. I used my own gigabit switch connecting my vMix and laptops and it worked great. I suggested that they place my switch in their closet and use it but it turned out that the locations involved 3 closets connect back to the core through fiber.

Day 2. I returned and they connected all but one of the laptops to the network via Ethernet cables and made network config changes to forward Bonjour across network and wireless. Still had trouble. After some network troubleshooting I decided to experiment with NDI Access Manager even though all devices were on the same subnet. I put the IP of my vMix on the networks tab and then added a Server outputs group and a Displays Receive group. BAM! It worked.

I had venue convert the DHCP address of my vMix to a static reserve and then configured Access Manager on all the laptops connected to the displays. All worked, even the wireless, except it is dropping frames. The laptop being used only has an N card in it, not a AC wireless card. My laptop with an AC adapter works fine. The venue as decided that dropping frame on the one display will be acceptable.

Lessons learned
If you are going to use NDI for temporary events...
1. Make sure your Source computer's firewall is open so that Video Monitor (clients) can connect.
2. Use your own network gear where ever possible. You will not have to deal with unknown configurations, possible network issues, intermittent traffic problems.
3. If you must use client's network, ensure you test at the venue well in advance. Request that they verify mDNS (bonjour) is permitted and forwarded across the network.
4. Use wired network where possible
5. If you must use wireless, make sure it is an AC wireless for full HD. Make sure your clients have an AC network card as well.
6. Use NDI Access Manager and configure it with your NDI source on the Network tab. I would recommend always using Access Manager just to be safe.

I found that the NDI stream took between 100-150 Mb/s for a 1080i 59.94 stream. A little more than what is in documentation.

Question for vMix staff
Actually this is a feature request. Can you add an advanced button to the NDI settings? vMix should be able to do the same thing as Access Manager so you can pull in other NDI sources. If the Access Manager broadcast info vMix should be able to do that as well.

Hi

thanks for this feedback. Finally you dropped the idea of broadcasting to the other building?

Maybe you can update this topic's title so that it reflects better the content. Finally it turned out RTSP or Multicast are not even discussed here. Something like "Options for distributing a stream on a local network" or "Using NDI to feed multiple screens on a local network" would be more informative for other users looking for this type of information.

Guillaume