NDI drop out

Maximortal

Hi, I'm creating a show where a Kinect and 1 usb camera are connected to a Mac ( with ni mate) placed in scene then through a direct connection with cat 5 cable I send ni mate (NDI 2Syphon) and the camera to another Mac in control booth where Isadora and qlab see the stream. My issue is that I had some random dropout and scatter. Anyone know how to minimize em? Thanks in advance

Fred

@maximortal just to check you are running a gigabit network and all hubs, switches and routers are gigabit devices?

Maximortal

@fred the two Mac are connected directly with cat 5. No switch no router and so on.

Fred

@maximortal I have had some scenarios where it defaults to 100mb, check the link speed (http://www.mactip.net/how-to-c...). I would guess then that the encoding overhead or ram usage may be to high. Check the activity monitor on the encoding machine to see resource use. USB cameras, especially HD ones are pretty resource heavy as they output a heavily compressed stream that needs to be decompressed, and then re-encoded, the kinect is also a bit hungry when used on a mac. I dont use nimate, I am not sure if it is multi threaded.

fubbi

@maximortal

for gigabit, you should use a cat6 cable. cat5 is a bad idea for anything over 100mpbs. I have resolved similar issues by switching to cat6

also, under sysprefs/ethernet/advanced/hardware you can set it to gigabit instead of auto, just to make double sure

bonemap

@fubbi said:

switching to cat6

Just to reiterate the use of cat 6 cable and to add that if your cable is running through a theatre grid or near other cables that could produce interference it is my experience that shielded cat 6 cable is a good idea. I got a local av company to make up a 40 mtr shielded cat 6 cable for this purpose. It was not cheap but I have been able to hire it back to the theatre a number of times for other shows because it reduces so many issues when using video extenders through their 'noisy' grid.

Best wishes

Bonemap