Hi, I just realized to my dismay that I can only have 3 RTSP outs running at once on my gpu. I can’t find any way to stream NDI to android. How can I stream 30 video-outs to 30 android phones simultaneously?
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Unfortunately the answer is probably “Ten Computers with 3 RTSP streams each”. The 3 RTSP stream limitation is imposed by NVidia (not Derivative) on all of their “consumer grade” cards. Even though you are sending the video out of a network connection (and not an HDMI or DisplayPort), RTSP still requires using an encoder to create the stream to actually send out.
You may be able to get more than 3 streams running with a workstation grade Quadro card - as those don’t impose the limitation, but I bet you will then run up against a processing limitation well before getting 30 streams running at the same time on a single computer.
Same goes for NDI or really any method of sending video over the network - I would love to be proven wrong but I’m pretty sure even without NVidia imposed limitations, you’re not going to be able to get more than 10 running at a time and performance may suffer.
If you have control over the android side of the equasion, you might be able to figure out how to send one higher-res stream and then have each Android listen to said stream (multicast) and then just crop into their own designated portion of the screen - AKA send your multiple screens out as a grid inside a single (or multiple) higher-res streams. Though of course that doesn’t help if the resolutions don’t add up.
Right, I definitely thought of that as an option. Any idea how to crop it on the Android side? I’m not having much luck finding an app that can do that.
I think SRT can send out to multiple clients at once. If you are looking to send the same content to multiple devices, I’d try that route
No, I’m looking for each phone to have a different video feed. As @Peeet said, I should be able to multi-stream one high res composite video and then crop it on the android side. Haven’t found any RTSP apps that have that functionality, unfortunately.
I haven’t found anything off-hand… I feel like VLC should be able to do it - but only because I can do it with the desktop version.
MX Player does allow you to zoom and pan around the video with two-finger gestures… but not in any programmatic way that I can figure.
My last idea was to try to make a super simple android app with either Unreal Engine or even just the Android SDK that I could sideload onto a bunch of Android Tablets to be able to have each one pick a different section of video based on a text file or something… But having that idea is as far as I got.
If you do stumble upon a novel way to do this, please do let me know!
Thanks for the reply. I’m looking into hiring a dev to make something. I could also launch videos on the phones themselves but would be really great to be able to control all that from TD.
Do you know of a way I could use TD to control the launch of local video files on the phones?
Many years ago I did something similar using a bunch of Raspberry Pi SBC as the playback devices. The system used a free (at the time) software called PiWall. The server (VLC in my case) sent out one large stream and the clients each played back a predetermined area of this stream. It seems there is a similar commercial product available for Android as well called Multisplay. They seem to have a free trial version available.
Perhaps you could generate 3 x large streams from a single computer and split it among your 30 Android devices using this method?
I haven’t tried it myself but if you do please let us know if it worked out for you!
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Amazing! Thanks for that I’ll look into it!