Fortunately, NDI Video and Unifi works without too much issue.
I’ve been using Magewell NDI/SDI encoders and decoders as I’ve found them to be the most reliable in testing, have quite a few options for signal transport on both the transmitter and receiver side and the decoders have some additional decode options like RTMP/RTSP and MPEG-TS.
I have also tried Kiloview N3 NDI/SDI encoders/decoders, but I’ve had some issues with reliability with the signal dropping and not auto re-connecting. I tried reaching out to support and they were unresponsive both via email and in their facebook group.
I also tried the BirdDog Quad encoder/decoders and they failed miserably. I could not get the decoder to reliably connect and stay connected to to a birddog encoder and I had to run a beta version of the firmware (provided by support) to use advertised features. Also, this is a broadcast facility using 1080i and the encoder/decoder pair did not like interlaced footage. The output quality was very blocky. I ended up returning those units.
For Unifi, be sure to turn on Enable IGMP snooping in the network settings. This is to manage network bandwidth and I have not had any issues with it being enabled. Leaving this disabled will result in each NDI signal data being sent to all endpoints and it will quickly saturate the 1Gb network links.
For the Magewell Encoder, I’ve been using both TCP (Uni-Connection) and UDP (Multicast) for the Transport Mode. Primarily I use TCP (Uni-Connection) for point-to-point signals and TCP (Uni-Connection) if I’m doing a one-to-any signal flow. The TCP (Uni-Connection) will create a duplicate network stream for each receiving device and, depending on your needs, can eat up bandwith. The UDP (Multicast) uses the same signal for multiple destinations.
For the Magewell NDI Decoder, I’ve had good luck setting the buffer to the lowest setting of 1ms. Having it at the default setting of 60ms resulted in sync drift.
Last Updated October 2021 Unifi Controller Version 6.4.5.40 Switch Firmware 5.43.36.12724
