Video transmission from a location to a studio

Few years ago, NewTek company introduced NDI protocol. In the basement of the idea lies the transmission of media-flow in a satisfactory quality and with minimum delay by using a usual computer net instead of expensive SDI-commutations. Developers are strongly convinced that the future of video-industry consists in freely and well-qualified transmission of video into the IP-space and that soon NDI will eject an old-fashioned ways of video transmission. The idea and the solution have given a good account of the auditory, and the support of NDI by many vendors of the soft indicates that. We as the developers of the soft consider the main advantage of NDI that it is like a glue which helps to connect various programs flexibly building workflow of the media-flow.

Talking with colleges who organise Internet-transmission of different events we have often heard about the problem of video transmission from geo-position to studio. For example, an event takes place in many places and the signal is needed to be transmitted to studio for the next processing (addition of titles) and Internet translation.

Why shouldn’t we use NDI which has been spoken higher in order to solve the problem?

NDI is used for working in the local net because it is needed in a very wide channel. One of NDI using claims a gigabyte net. As you can understand, it is impossible for the Internet transmission. In the best case you can create a 40-megabyte link between geo-spot and a studio.

Anyway, the workflow must be compressed for the Internet transmission. So we have a such sequence of action: compression in a geo-spot, then Internet transmission and decoding and convertation into NDI for the next workflow. There have already been some solutions of this problem. Their main point consists in putting the transiver on the geo-spot.

However, computers of the geo-spot already have a base streaming software, such as vMix or OBS. It seems to us that it would be easy to use only them without any additional programs. The idea has some significant advantages. In particular, you do not need to download some additional staff and consequently you need not to learn how to use all nuances of a new program. Moreover, people working on the places know vMix or OBS brilliantly, so their usage as a transiver seems logical.

Perhaps, you have already been using such scheme, e.g. with Wowza or nginx-rtmp server. But it is important to mention that respondents had a significant delay of signal even in a local net — from 3 seconds and higher. Furthermore, a setting of the server claims specific knowledge and a plenty of time.

That is why we have created RTMPMiniServer program, which is easy to be used. It accepts RTMP-flows on the input and turns them into NDI. This solution let decrease the delay significantly. Also advantages of our idea are opportunities of working both in the local net and the Internet and usage RTMP protocol which has given a good account. Moreover, a work with a base software installed on computers of geo-spot will help to avoid intermediate cloud servers because the signal is transmitted to the studio immediately. On the output we get NDI which is supported by all popular programs: vMix, OBS, Wirecast and so on.

To be honest, our idea has one minus, hardly ever can it be called significant disadvantages. It is more likely to be a requirement. It consists in importance for a studio to have a white IP-address. Most likely, your studio has such address and all what is need is to set the port forwarding. This procedure is rather simple and accessible.

As so as our server is based on RTMP protocol, the signal from mobile phones (iPhone and Android) and live-streaming devises such as GoPro and Mevo cameras can be transmitted on it. Without any doubt, that is a huge advantage.

Soon we will tell you about an experiment about testing our solution of transmitting 4K signal through Atlantics and how to make Mevo camera friends with vMix and OBS by using our solution.

Download and test for free RTMPMiniServer from our website: http://garaninapps.com/rtmpminiserver