Quick question for you NDI gurus out there:

What's the cheapest mini PC that could convert an NDI stream to HDMI?


Here's the context:

I'm the A/V manager at my church and we're looking to upgrade our video distribution in the near future. Right now we're running composite video to oldschool Tube TVs over RG6 (with a few line amps here and there). Yes, it's hideous.

We already have Ethernet distributed throughout the church and I was thinking of feeding an NDI stream over a dedicated portion of the network to each TV on the campus. However, I can't seem to find a cost-effective way to convert NDI to HDMI.

I'm aware of the presale BirdDog option, but at $1k per box that's a bit steep for video distribution:
http://www.bird-dog.tv/
It's also not available yet.

Have any of you guys looked into connecting a miniPC to the back of a TV and then just running a simple NDI viewer?

Looks Vmix BasicHD would be $60 for the software. I see miniPCs anywhere from $100 to $500. This would be a lot cheaper than the BirdDog option.

Does Vmix require the full "supported hardware specs" to do a simple NDI viewer?
http://www.vmix.com/soft.../supported-hardware.aspx

It looks like the Intel Atom processors are a bit cheaper, but they're only 1.6GHz.

Here are a few computers I'm looking at:
http://www.cappuccinopc....ernet-2xHdmi_mini-pc.asp
https://www.amazon.com/G...ini%2Bpc%2Bbrix&th=1


Any thoughts or opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Guillaume, thanks for the reply! I should have mentioned that I'm completely new to the video world. I ran into the vMix booth at NAB just a few weeks ago and was super excited by its capabilities. Upgrading our video distribution came as an afterthought.

Do you have any UDP Multicast solutions you would recommend? That makes a lot more sense to me - I'm just having trouble finding the right solution. I have come across several google hits referencing VLC. Is that the software you'd recommend?

How does one get their vMix output streaming over a UDP Multicast? It looks like VLC will work on the remote TV side of things, but I don't know how to go from vMix output to UDP Multicast. Does vMix have that capability built-in?

Here are some items I found in my search:
http://www.vmix.com/know...-transport-stream-or-udp
https://forums.vmix.com/....aspx?g=posts&t=7226
https://forums.vmix.com/....aspx?g=posts&t=9655

The one link makes it sound like it's built-in, but the other threads make it sound like there needs to be some kind of VLC or FFFMPEG installation. Digging through their documentation, it's not clear to me how to configure the setup. Is it really as simple as a few lines of command line code?

I would go to a hardware solution for this. Something like http://avermedia.com/pro...duct/f239_plus/overview. I have one of these that I use and it works great. There are other vendors in this space too. Take the load off your production switcher as much as you can.

If you are willing to give NDI a miss.

How about a Digital Modulator (the method I use, 45 TVS in a complex). Latency around 1.6 seconds. Not cheap, but cheaper than NDI if you already have TV amplified around your complex.

Then the TVs in your facility just "Tune Into" your own private TV station. SO NO RECEIVER EQUIPMENT the receiver is built into the Digital TVs.

An example: https://www.adigitalife.com/68-hdmi-modulator

I actually use one with 4 HDMI inputs and does 4 Channels at once (http://www.resi-linx.com/index.php?id_product=55&controller=product).

If you don't have so many TVS and really want to use IP. There are HDMI over IP devices. Yes they support 1 sender to many receivers.

An example: https://www.adigitalife....ith-poe-transmitter.html

Cheaper than BirdDogs and available already. I've used these in a few edge cases where I didn't have an antenna socket for the TV, but did have Cat5 and a separate VLAN. Do not mix these on the same VLAN as your normal network traffic. They broadcast bogging your network data lan with unwanted traffic. So put on a VLAN by itself so your network cards do not get millions of packets a day they have to listen to and ignore.

Just one sender and then one receiver per TV (that is the expensive part once you have many receiving TVs).

Essentially NDI in it's current form is not a great TV distribution product. There are other solutions that are more cost effective. The Digital Modulator is very effective, especially if you want Free to Air TV down the same cable. You will need amplifiers if going a great distance.

That may change as NDI matures, I hope it does.

Check this thread for an easy way to stream by multicast in your internal network:

https://forums.vmix.com/....aspx?g=posts&t=7226

As a receiver, like DWAN wrote, a Raspberry Pi with VLC on it is enough.

Regards,
Patrick

If your plan is to distribute via IP it seems to me that this is really a digital signage application.

You can send a stream from vMix to nginx with mod_RTMP, then use almost anything (VLC) to receive the stream at each TV. I like the little Fit-PC embedded PCs from CompuLab for this, but a Raspberry Pi would do.

It would be really nice to have a convenient way to leverage an app on a cheap smart TV. That would be very tidy.

I have very successfully used the Zotac ZBOX-PI320-W2 machines to receive. I have them setup in Windows 10 in kiosk mode, so the system boots directly to the NDI receiver application. When I bought it the price was ~$150, but they have newer, smaller and better ones in the same line for less.

For a bit more I have used analog modulators http://www.ambery.com/albncviautor.html and converted my HDMI output to BNC or RCA and then distributed the signal over the existing wiring and setup (multiple church buildings).

So true! Adding hardware to a TV seems fiddly and prone to problems. Still, it would be nice if we could stream to an app that was already on the TV.

As I wrote before, here : https://forums.vmix.com/...ts&m=40435#post40435
there are many things to be answered before we can give better advices.

Going for IP distribution (many solutions) is useless if the network is not suitable
Opting for a receiver device, even cheap, is useless if there is nobody to operate it
etc...

Now let's wait to have more information

What is the image quality when you go this route? Is it indistinguishable from the hdmi source?

Looks like all of these websites want me to login to see pricing - what kind of price range for the transmitter? $500'ish? We're running composite video everywhere, but I think it's using RG6 coax. I wonder if the existing video amplifiers would be able to transmit the digital signal.


Btw, thanks everyone for the feedback - this has been super helpful.