So for 8 Channels -- what System Spec works well? Hardware + I/O. Since this is Mac Product that only works with BlackMagic Cards it's not as easy to just plug in a PCIe Card to a slot :)
So what are you using Mac hardware but also I/O hardware? Also is that at 1080p59.94? What Bit rate would you be using per Stream?
Hi Les.
The 2 PCIe cards of interest are the BMD Duo2 (4 channels) and the Quad 2 (8 channels). These work with older MacPros in the box, or with any modern mac via a low cost external Thunderbolt Chassis from Sonnet. The BMD Cards both support up to 1080p60, but this whole topic also extends to UHD.
The data rate for (regular) NDI is defined by the codec, and it ranges around the 100mBit/sec for a 1080i50 stream. The NDI Outlet app also supports NDI HX which comes from specific devices (mostly professional PTZ Cameras) and also the NewTek spark converter (SDI to NDI HX). NDI HX uses H.264 compression between 8 and 20mBit/sec and is primarily there to support cameras with built in H.264 compression and for Wireless transmission applications.
You can just about fit 8 channels of NDI into a Gigabit pipe, but all modern macs will support additional NICs via very low cost USB-C or Thunderbolt adaptors and NDI scales across NICs. No need to go to 10GBit unless you really want to.
We have yet to establish some clear spec. metrics for 8 channels, but I am hopeful that a quad i7 MacBook Pro or iMac with an external Sonnet Chassis should cope. We plan to test that next week.
Its possible that a top spec Dual i7 Mac Mini in a Sonnet 1U rack might work, but that needs testing to define the limits.
Some recent testing done with older hardware showed that an early 2009 MacPro Tower (Dual Quad Xeon) was only using about 75% of one CPU per channel of NDI to SDI for 1080/50i. So, with 8/16 Hyperthread cores that machine would be capable of handling 8 channels of NDI to SDI even though its nearly 9 years old. Oh, and in case anyone wondered, these tests are done Post-meltdown/spectre patching :-)
Clearly 60p is going to tax things a little more, but as you can see the efficiency of the NDI codec is really shining here, and 4-8 channels is well within scope even on fairly modest machines. Some of the new iMacs are really fast, and so they will work nicely. For most applications its *not* going to require an expensive trashcan MacPro.
In time we may release Windows and Ubuntu versions of these apps and that will open things up a little on hardware.
For not a lot of money, you can equip an SDI-only Ross Switcher with a compact subsystem to add 8 channels of NDI Input. That's got to be interesting to some folks I would imagine.
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