Here's a curious thing. Setting up for a conference where I was using (2) BirdDog Studio encoders to capture presenter laptops at podiums. Naturally, we'll be changing sources as we transition between presenters. So, there will occasionally be no input connected to the BDS.

When this happens it hangs vMix hard. So hard that I can't kill the process from task manager. I must reboot the PC, which is definitely not an option. FWIW, the faulty NDI stream also causes problem for Newtek Studio Monitor.

To overcome this issue I tried two things:

(1) Added a Decimeter Design scaler ahead of the BirdDog encoder. I've used these in the past to ensure that the source is always 1080p59.94. This did not help the problem of vMix hanging when we changed source laptops upstream.

(2) Fed SDI output of the scaler into a BDM ATEM, using it as a frame sync. Input #1 routed to aux out #1 to BirdDog #1. This DID solve the problem.

I've opened a ticket with BirdDog on this matter. They admit that there are circumstances which cause their encoder to send a faulty stream. That should not happen. They should act like a frame sync. Lacking for an input, send clean back.

It's worth noting how vMix behaved. vMix did not crash, but become uncontrollable.

The gear was rented for an event, so I had little opportunity to experiment. May experiment using BirdDog Mini now that I'm back in my office.

Oh, yes. But by the time the source was switched vMix was already ceased up, forcing a reboot of the PC. Rebooting the BDS devices would have been annoying but acceptable.

I'm waiting on Fedex to return my vMix host. It should arrive tomorrow. Then I'll be able to test again.

That test will use a BirdDog Mini and several different source computers.

This is peripheral to vMix, but further testing with a BirdDog Mini has shown that changing input will quite often cause a downstream device using the NDI stream to fail. Not always, but often enough.

In testing I used vMix and NDI Studio Monitor. Most often, NDI Studio Monitor loses the stream and eventually collapses. Occasionally it displays a malformed image (as attached.)



I've passed my findings to BirdDog support. IMHO, the device should have a more graceful failure mode. It should never output a faulty stream.

BirdDog has reported that the matter has been addressed in the pending v3.0 firmware release.

It was in a long comment thread in the NDI Video Users group on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com...rmalink/410351526263562/

As for beta access, you'll need to approach the company about that.

BirdDog sent me beta 5 of 3.0 firmware. Hoping it will resolve the issue.

Quite shocked to read about "... funky sources or incorrectly detected formats ..." which will cause vMix to halt completely.

Would have hoped to see NDI implementations being much more mature at this point. I mean it is 2019 now. When was NDI introduced? When was the first Birddogs introduced?

A firmware to fix what Michael Graves has reported is just about to be rolled out in v3.

Reading this report I'm very happy that we're still running most everything on HD-SDI.

The beta firmware did not prevent a hard crash during broadcast yestersay. Also the birddogs do not like any amount of heat. They crash constantly. One of the birddogs stopped receiving hdmi video. I think it is dead. My opinion is that these are junk. We purchased 3 magewell ndi devices for testing. Unfortunately we are not able to see them in vMix or in nd Monitor app. I am able to access the web interface on them and successfully updated the firmware on all 3. Still can't get video. Does anyone make good ndi hardware?

You could try out Newtek's Spark lineup https://www.newtek.com/spark/

Newtek themselves are developing NDI so that could prove beneficial.