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BirdDog Encoder Hangs vMix Hard
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Quote: One of the birddogs stopped receiving hdmi video. I think it is dead. My opinion is that these are junk. Kind of a bold statement yes i had some issues with BD , once because of some camera issues and once , i forgot, but it wasnt working in each case after contacting their support they did their upmost to fix it either by adjusting the firmware or directly connecting to my machine and fixing the problem . Best part , each time i didn't even have to wait that long. and... i am very happy with my BD especially becasue i can relay on the support , ame can be said about vMix itself :-)
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I am the CEO of BirdDog and have staked my reputation on making NDI hardware that is reliable and great value.
We provided this guy with beta firmware which by definition is not public firmware. The expectation is if you have an issue with Beta firmware you report it to the manufacturer.
Since the there also seems to be problems with another vendors hardware at the same site I would suggest the issue is site related.
As most people who know is will attest to. We try super hard to make people happy and successful. Engage with us and we will be there to help you. Talk about us on another forum and we will struggle to assist.
Dan
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Originally Posted by: DanMiall  I am the CEO of BirdDog and have staked my reputation on making NDI hardware that is reliable and great value.
We provided this guy with beta firmware which by definition is not public firmware. The expectation is if you have an issue with Beta firmware you report it to the manufacturer.
Since the there also seems to be problems with another vendors hardware at the same site I would suggest the issue is site related.
As most people who know is will attest to. We try super hard to make people happy and successful. Engage with us and we will be there to help you. Talk about us on another forum and we will struggle to assist.
Dan Hi Dan. I would like to apologise for refering to BirdDog hardware as junk. Also I would like to apologise for blaming the troubles we had on the hardware(this includes Magewell). Both brands function as expected since figuring out that the cheap hdmi cables we used was the cause of the hard crashing and no signal issue. The BirdDogs performed great once that was figured out. I don't know if this will upset anyone, but one of the BirdDogs had a loose screw internally thay was shorting out the circuit board. After fixing this it functioned very well. A second BirdDog had all 4 of its cover screws back out. Tightening them back up fixed that. This is a testrment to the resiliency of the hardware, but maybe some extra QA checks would be a good idea. I hope that BirdDog can accept my apology for jumping the gun and accusing the hardware of being junk. Now if we could only prevent vMix from crashing when receiving a bad signal, that would be sweet. We had another hard crash right at the beginning of our broadcast because an HDMI cable was unplugged from a camera.
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kevev,
If you are still seeing crashes using the latest 3.0 beta firmware I would suggest reporting this to BirdDog, as it is up to the encoder
to ensure they do not send a corrupt stream, as it is not possible to mitigate against this from our side.
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All recent beta releases for the BirdDog Mini have been stable in my lab.
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Originally Posted by: admin kevev,
If you are still seeing crashes using the latest 3.0 beta firmware I would suggest reporting this to BirdDog, as it is up to the encoder
to ensure they do not send a corrupt stream, as it is not possible to mitigate against this from our side.
Martin, BirdDog says that "these issues do not exist in any other NDI application including TriCaster, NDI Monitor, Streamstar, Wirecast, etc etc." If the above is correct, would you insist that nothing can be done from your side? I know that you said earlier that you simply "rely on the NewTek NDI implementation", but it is slightly problematic then if Tricaster is immune to the issue reported here. Such robustness to sudden disconnects, bad HDMI cables, funky sources or even problematic firmware, would be worth more to me than all the new features added to vMix in version 23. And if that would come with a loss in performance, I would happily accept that.
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Originally Posted by: niemi Originally Posted by: admin kevev,
If you are still seeing crashes using the latest 3.0 beta firmware I would suggest reporting this to BirdDog, as it is up to the encoder
to ensure they do not send a corrupt stream, as it is not possible to mitigate against this from our side.
Martin, BirdDog says that "these issues do not exist in any other NDI application including TriCaster, NDI Monitor, Streamstar, Wirecast, etc etc." If the above is correct, would you insist that nothing can be done from your side? I know that you said earlier that you simply "rely on the NewTek NDI implementation", but it is slightly problematic then if Tricaster is immune to the issue reported here. Such robustness to sudden disconnects, bad HDMI cables, funky sources or even problematic firmware, would be worth more to me than all the new features added to vMix in version 23. And if that would come with a loss in performance, I would happily accept that. Agreed. At least to me it does not seem to make sense that vMix could not be protected from hard crash if bad signal received.
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Originally Posted by: niemi Originally Posted by: admin kevev,
If you are still seeing crashes using the latest 3.0 beta firmware I would suggest reporting this to BirdDog, as it is up to the encoder
to ensure they do not send a corrupt stream, as it is not possible to mitigate against this from our side.
Martin, BirdDog says that "these issues do not exist in any other NDI application including TriCaster, NDI Monitor, Streamstar, Wirecast, etc etc." That quote doesn't sound right, in all the cases we have received including from Bird Dog, the issue was also seen and replicated in Studio Monitor. If you have found an instance of an issue that only occurs in vMix, please do contact us with steps to replicate, as it would be news to us. To clarify we use the standard NDI SDK that every other app uses. If there is crash due to a bad stream, it will occur in all other applications using the NDI SDK.
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Originally Posted by: admin
That quote doesn't sound right, in all the cases we have received including from Bird Dog, the issue was also seen and replicated in Studio Monitor.
As the one who first reported this issue, I agree with Martin. In every case where I was having a problem with an NDI stream arriving in vMix, it also caused that problem for any other downstream NDI application. The failure mode might be different, but the result was always the need to restart the downstream application.
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Originally Posted by: admin That quote doesn't sound right, in all the cases we have received including from Bird Dog, the issue was also seen and replicated in Studio Monitor.
If you have found an instance of an issue that only occurs in vMix, please do contact us with steps to replicate, as it would be news to us.
To clarify we use the standard NDI SDK that every other app uses.
If there is crash due to a bad stream, it will occur in all other applications using the NDI SDK. Eamon posted this earlier in the NDI Video Users public Facebook group: Quote:ok so here’s the thing. We released 2.6.2 firmware on our public website some 6 months ago and everything was working fine with vMix and every other application. Something changed about a month ago (a windows update perhaps or something funky) and we started getting reports (and I need to stress hard here we have only had one or two reports) of stuff not working in vMix and some crashes happening. We are working on fixes and working closely with vMix on this.
The user in this thread on vMix can’t get Magewell working either. At which point is it our product or a site related issue. We have no support tickets from what I can see from this user so if he doesn’t contact us how can we help him?
But again I need to stress that these issues do not exist in any other NDI application including TriCaster, NDI Monitor, Streamstar, Wirecast, etc etc.
We love vMix they are are our great mates. We will fix this but but flaming our hardware on public forums isn’t the really to get our best support or solve the problem.
Honestly do we even know if he has changed cables? Tested a different switch, etc
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Oww.Guess I had that coming. Yes I have tried other cables and switches. The issue is very rare now that we have switched to better cables. At this point would ut be an NDI SDK limitation? Is the SDK crashing, and this is causing vMix to crash? Who knows.
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Any conclusion on this yet?
On the vMix side of things, Martin said that vMix "don't implement the decoding ourselves and rely on the NewTek NDI implementation", so I don't expect any development from their side to avoid these NDI related hard crashes. He said that these hard crashes didn't happen with other NDI converters.
On the other side, the Birddog team underlined that their converters only hard crashed vMix and that the issue likely arose with particular combinations of Windows updates and vMix.
They then worked on a beta firmware to fix the issue. Is there a final firmware out?
And yes, what should we take from all this?
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Originally Posted by: niemi Any conclusion on this yet?
My initial experience is that ANY NDI client software would hang when presented with a faulty stream. Not just vMix. I tried NDI Studio Monitor, too. As I said before, all recent beta releases for the BirdDog Mini have been stable in my lab. Last week I installed the production version of the v3.0 firmware for BirdDog Mini. No issues to report.
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