Hi,
Im wondering if a mini pc runnig an Intel Atom Z8350 with 4GB of ram and a usb3 capture card could encode 1 stream of NDI.

How is the Birdog doint it? cuz im sure is not runing an i5 or 8gb ram

That's certainly the reason why it's taking so long. They had to develop a chip powerful enough to handle it without overheating and make it reliable.

The minimum CPU spec is based on using the standard NewTek NDI libraries (on PC, Mac or Linux). If you go a different route, as Kane has said, and take the more difficult low-level coding approach to implementing the codec, then there's all sorts of potential processor options (and pitfalls). However, BirdDog are aiming to support "full-spec NDI" rather than NDI-HX as in the Connect Spark, so it depends on what you require as to what's the best option.

I just wonder how much compression is aplied in to NDI HX

Bom dia Alex

NDI|HX is H.264 basically, with lower latency for transport when wrapped in NDI protocol.
High quality NDI|HX is 10 Mbits

Guillaume

Hi All, I think it is about time I became active on this forum!

BirdDog is using a custom hardware approach to processing video into NDI, this is based on an FPGA processor which means it is low power, high performance and can be made very compact. Getting anything to work on an FPGA is specialist work, and video is probably the most specialised of FPGA applications. No doubt it has taken longer than we or anyone wanted for us to produce BirdDog, but the fact remains it is the ONLY hardware implementation of the 'core', high quality, i-frame only NDI protocol in operation. We are a new company so we have developed everything from the ground up here, the team has literally been working day and night.

The recent announcements of NDI3 are great news for everyone, it allows IP workflows to reach further out into the production. NewTek's boxes really are great at that part of the equation, areas where you would usually have to use traditional h.264 network streaming or wireless links can now be seamlessly integrated into your production with lower latency than ever before. These new NewTek devices, along with announcements from various PTZ manufacturers all utilise the NDI|HX subset of NDI3, which is the 'high efficiency' compression scheme, without going into details, as magical as NDI is, something has to give when you reduce compression by tenfold, hence NDI 'core' is still very much part of the NDI3 specifications.

I would go as far as to say that people wishing to use NDI on their main production cameras on commercial productions that are used to using HDMI or SDI cameras are not likely to want to use the new NewTek Spark devices as their primary feed, and similarly people wanting to send video over a sub-par network or WiFi will be disappointed with BirdDog Studio NDI operating with NDI 'core' technology.

I genuinely see a place for all these currently announced products in the same production with no real overlap.

Onto more things BirdDog:

At shipping (this week for 'pre-orderers'!) we will support the following features, with a huge amount more to come over a short period of time (I know we have a long way to go to make you all believe our timelines!)

- 1920x1080 HDMI and SDI Video input (including Interlaced and progressive rates, up to 60p, Auto-syncing to input rate)
- NDI hardware encoding in realtime
- On-board Tally, fully integrated with NDI
- Power over Ethernet

Us here at BirdDog are truly excited about NDI and are very optimistic about it and our future in the world of IP production. Any questions, feel free to ask! Sorry about the long post, I'll be more brief in future!

Dan Miall
Founder & CEO, BirdDog.

I can't get enough information about NDI products :)


Do you also have plans to sell cheaper basic SDI-NDI and HDMI-NDI converters in the future?

Absolutely! My former employer (Pixel Power) developed broadcast graphics system based upon some of the most capable FPGAs offered at the time. They implemented multi-stream (8x) MJPEG with alpha and audio, encoding, decoding and compositing. All done in real-time for live broadcast applications.

It's seriously specialized work. The resulting intellectual property is a serious asset.

While there are "mezzanine" compression schemes that have found a home in professional production, it's unclear where HDI|HX will fit. It will certainly be widely used, the question is by whom?

It's a vast market out there. There's room for all manner of solutions.

Intercom ona NDI work flow would be great!! On Birdog or Spark would be perfect!!