First test of new NDI® over Internet tech
This Thursday we released a beta version of a simple product that makes NDI® streams available at remote locations with almost the same latency as they would on a local area network.
We built a pair of very simple Windows apps. The first app, the “Publisher” will scan your network for available NDI® streams and allow you to publish them with just one click. It will also generate a unique ID that you’d have to submit to the other app, the “Receiver”, which can be located as far as in another town or country. In the Receiver you can preview the streams and bring them out via NDI®.
This makes it possible for selected NDI® streams at a venue in Chicago to be instantly available in a studio in Atlanta — as long as there’s enough bandwidth and a stable connection.
Since we‘ve had a fair deal of experience with various professional hardware, we also added support for Blackmagic’s SDI devices, which are automatically detected as sources by the Publisher app and are available as outputs in the Receiver app.
We asked several users to try the product, including Richard Gatarski, founder of WeStreamU, a video production company in Sweden. He previously implemented an interesting project having physically expanded the LAN of his studio in Stockholm by about 19 kilometres with optical fiber.
On Friday Richard wrote a blog post and made a video where he reconstructed a similar setup, but this time using our tool over a mobile 4G connection with public Internet.
As you can see in his demo, the latency they had between venue and studio is barely noticeable, allowing them to communicate as if they were on a video call.
As he explains, the bandwidth setting in our application was hard-coded to 20 Mbit/s. Since there’s really no limit in the technology, we released an update today, where we added a “Bitrate” dropdown letting users define it in the range from 2.5 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s.
We also added a virtual output which makes the Receiver’s streams available in other applications as video sources. We expect this to reduce the latency and CPU load when using our tool with applications like vMix (just like in Richard’s video).
Feel free to download the new version and let us know what works and what doesn’t.