I was excited when NDI input was added. I still haven’t used that on any job, but I’ve been playing around with it a bit. I find NDI itself a bit clunky. I downloaded the latest NDI Tools 6.01 and installed it, so I could generate streams on my laptop to send to my computer that runs Onyx. I’ve been using the VLC plug in to generate the streams. It works, but there are several glitches and annoyances with it.
Anyone else using this kind of setup to test/learn NDI input with Dylos?
I can report one thing: you can upgrade to NDI 6.01 and it doesn’t break the NDI 5 that is installed with Onyx.
I also have Onyx installed on my laptop, and NDI 5 is installed as part of that. I feared that when I installed the updated NDI 6 it might mess with Onyx, but no, it appears to be just fine. I noticed that while installing NDI 6, it wiped out everything NDI 5 in the start menu, except for “NDI 5 Runtime”, so that must be the bit that Onyx is still using.
hello, we use ndi a lot. with nx1 and on pc with wing. the most important thing for using it without unexpected glitches and stutters, is the network u use it with. as faster and more isolated only for ndi, as less problems you will have.
the second thing we realized, is that the vlc plugin himself can be a problem. since we send ndi from resolume instead of vlc, we have much more stable results.
Yes, I find the VLC playback to be a bit annoying. On my setups, when the clip ends, the NDI stream goes blank, and I have to close and reopen VLC to restore it, even though the video appears to be still looping in VLC. The other annoyance is that we have to change video output module in VLC, so it’s own screen is blank, and I can use Studio Monitor in the NDI Tools to view the stream, but if I want to later use VLC normally to watch a video, I have to reset the output module.
I’ve also had difficulty choosing which network to use. I have a laptop with two external USB network adaptors. With the NDI Tools Access Manager, I can see them both and I’m supposed to be able to choose which one NDI goes out over, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet. The only setting that gives me a stream is “Automatic”, and that routes it to the network that I would prefer to reserve just for sACN.
@deflost, I’m not going to be able to use Resolume, and I don’t have the budget for external hardware. Do you know of any cheap or free software that runs on PC that I could use to generate NDI streams?
Also, I think I may have discovered an Onyx/Dylos bug. When I applied a color palette to the NDI source stream, and then tried to remove that by setting “Palette Slot Selection” back to “Idle”, or by clearing the whole color parameter tab, the video did not revert to normal, but retained a palette. I could change palettes, but not remove one entirely. The only way to get back to the original uncolored video stream was to delete it from the library and re-add it.
I’ve only tried this on one computer so far, so consider this a preliminary report.
Thank you for your description of the issue.
Did you only encounter this when colouring an NDI source, or did you encounter this when colouring factory media content too?
Which version of Onyx were you running?
we also use OBS to generate ndi streams. it is free, but you have to install the ndi plugin.
Well, today I can’t reproduce this. I was doing a lot of switching around of settings. Trying to get NDI to prefer my second NIC rather than the one I use for sACN output. But now the color palette selection/idle is working normally.
I’ve noticed that Onyx seems to take a while to register the NDI input stream when I close and restart Onyx. I know the stream is still going on the network, but it doesn’t show up in my library/NDI sources until 2 or 3 minutes after I’ve restarted Onyx.
Thank you for the information. I’ll investigate further.
Update, re Onyx taking time to register a new NDI stream. I’ve just upgraded to a better network switch (formerly Zyxel GS1200, now Netgear M4250). I notice when I start a new NDI stream, Onyx is snappier about recognizing it. Still not instantaneous. But more like 10-30 second average wait than minutes.
Thank you for the update. This period of time for Onyx to detect and receive the NDI stream on the network is as expected.