I'd be shocked if the TV Station didn't have SDI injest capabilities. That is your best bet for both quality and reliability.

I have done this with vMix using a Decklink Mini Monitor HD-SDI out and set it to external in vMix to feed a microwave truck.

I own and manage a total of 24 stations, that are fed to multiple broadcasters, and have been doing so for 20 years.

Every broadcaster has a different requirement... But they all want signal stability and as pointed out (50 or 59.97(fields)ps interlaced)

My terrestrial broadcaster requires an ASI Transport stream, that is directly MUXED without modification into the actual transmissions, Jitter, latency, and general packet loss is the big issue here. I use a dedicated private IP leased line for these guys. I use 2-pass Harmonic or Grass Vally hardware encoders for these services, at the far end is a simple IP to ASI converter box.

My Primary satellite broadcasters insist on SDI, again I use a private IP leased line and have Harmonic Contribution encoders, and Harmonic IRD's (Broadcast speak for Decoder - Integrated Receiving Device) to decode it back to SDI for handover.

My Secondary satellite broadcasters required delivery over the open Internet. For this again I deliver using Harmonic encoders, with ProMPEG FEC (Forward error Correction), and then encode the output TS using the ARQ protocol to ensure reliable delivery over a broken internet - The internet is realy bad a getting UDP packets to their destination reliably.

My Primary Cable Broadcasters wanted raw MPEG transport streams, delivered over the internet, again sticking to harmonic MPEG/h.264 encoders which feed ARQ encoders (in this case ZIXI as the Cable company already had ZIXI decoders) and the transport stream as with my terrestrial broadcasters muxed the stream directly into their transmission.

I deliver IPTV to our national terrestrial DVB broadcaster as Apple HLS streams, using a pair of PC's (Primary & Backup) reading the IP TS output of the harmonic decoders as the input, and serving HLS to their EDGE servers.

I have studio's in Thailand and Canada which actually both contribute back to me at 1920x1080i50 using just VMIX and a propriety software package running on the same machine.

Every broadcaster is different..... I am a big fan of Harmonic equipment, but also recommend Tanburg/Ericsson, Thomson/Grass Valley.

You need a high quality encoder, not a toy, especially if they are going to use your encode (as opposed to a re-encode from SDI). If your being re-encoded, if possible, contribute at twice the bit rate they are broadcasting at to prevent re-encoding artefacts.

If you want to do it on the cheep, there are ways to do it, but NEVER tell the broadcaster how your contributing - just find out how THEY want it delivered, and then find the right solution.

PM me if you need help doing it the cheep way, especially if your using VMIX as your primary production tool. I am the contribution king. LOL

Keith

Harmonic stuff are great for sure. I also love ATEME contribution encoder like the Kyrion series
https://www.ateme.com/kyrion-cm5000/

OTOH, Open Source OBE is also a cheaper way to go. Appliances or DIY
http://obe.tv/

Guillaume

Try to use Medialooks (medialooks.com) (SDI/NDI in SDI/NDI out). We use this solution worldwide on various events. With a datarate of 20Mbit was the picture good enough for most of our applications.

Best,
Jan

I appreciate that .. I do this now but with mistserver. But I am not happy with the results... I send an rtmp stream to mistserver and then play as an rtmp on the vmix receive end. I wonder if vmix actually just passes the datastream, or if it decodes then rencodes the actually image.