NDI HX3 Support?

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Does the NDI In TOP support NDI HX3?

Trying to spec a camera and not sure how to test this without a source on hand that can generate HX3.

1 Like
2

I’d extend this to a RFE for refactoring the NDI Out operator to allow chosing between the current codecs. Low bitrate ones are desirable in a bunch of scenarios.

4

I don’t have a way to produce HX3, but I think it should work as long as it doesn’t require a newer SDK than what we are using. We currently don’t have access to output the other formats, but we are considering a way of doing that.

6

Thanks Malcolm. Seems to be a guideline for h.264 and h.265 streams wrapped in NDI metadata that conform to bitrate and latency requirements. The NDI Bridge allows transcoding to HX in its Local mode and TD 2023.11880 seems to decode those correctly.

7

As far as I can tell, even with the “NDI Advanced SDK” which I would imagine Newtek wants a lot of money for access to, there STILL isn’t a way to encode (aka send) NDI|HX anything. According to this page:

You can “Send” NDI|HX 2 and 3, but it says Send (passthrough) and not Send (encode) like the regular “NDI High Bandwidth”.

According to another page:

NDI HX is commonly found in hardware devices, like PTZ cameras and mobile phones, but it is possible to have NDI HX in software applications as well.

But they don’t go into any detail as to wether that is encode or decode, and what exatcly “passthrough” is supposed to mean. There would be a high amount of usability for a software like TD to be able to encode and send NDI|HX, (like this sweet little device from ZowieTek, but I get the feeling there is a good reason that ONLY the Newtek NDI Tools Bridge is the only SOFTware that has this implemented anywhere - and it doesn’t work on MacOS.

I don’t understand why NDI has been such a major letdown - just had a BirdDog Play completely crap out on me on a permanent install - but I am trying to never use it again (if I can at all help it) and Newtek seems to be encouraging me to uphold that decision.

I’m just curious what will turn out to be the VHS to Newtek’s BetaMax of NDI… Maybe Derivative wants to open source whatever is behind the “Touch IN / Touch OUT” TOPs?