MS switches and NDI from NewTek

[GaryShainberg]

Gang,

I am not sure if there is anyone else here (like me) also playing with NDI video, for anyone who does not know what it is:

NDI is a protocol that is for transported almost loss-less HDMI and 4K over IP, developed by NewTek, its the video version of Dante (which does the same for audio and has been around for some years).

There are constant discussions and requests for information about switches online that have the "umph" to support NDI as a 1080p60 stream is a CBR of 180mb/s and so if you have more than 4 streams you will need a 10G uplink port to get the data out of the switch.

There are a number of people who, when I say I am using Meraki, comment that Meraki switches are not good for NDI and that NewTek insiders say they do not give a great service.

Whilst I am only using (for now) a 220/8P and 4 NDI streams I can not find an evidence technically and no one has offered me any, as to why this may be the case.

This is a general shout out to find anyone else using / playing with NDI over Meraki to see what their thoughts are and have a discussion.

@Meraki is there any NDI guru's that could have a private chat with me over this - if we can find a way to disprove this, it could be an awesome revenue stream - these guys building NDI networks think nothing of spending $2-3K on a single camera, so many of them have the money but not the network expertise and they are out there buying Unifi and Netgear because it's easy to use and has a low price entry point. 

[PhilipDAth]

Does it need to route the streams, or is this only delivered inside of one VLAN?

[GaryShainberg]

@PhilipDAth its just within the vLANs so no external routing, thats done via the encoder

[PhilipDAth]

As long as all the interfaces are the same speed (e,g. Gigabit) then any switch should be fine.  That's just simple packet in - packet out.

[DR1]

We have BirdDog cameras using full NDI. Our validation tests didn't produce any uncertainty for us about using them with Meraki switches.

In a week or two, four of them will be in operation (along side 23 Meraki cameras, and hundreds of terabytes of routed A/V traffic) I'll post back here on our results, but honestly don't expect any problems.

[GaryShainberg]

DR1,

Thanks and interesting, I have been using 3 BD P200's and 2 BD MINI encloders, with no issues other then the need for a 10g port, this has so far been on a MS220-8P also with no issues.

But whenever the switch question comes up on the BD or NDI facebook communities there are a number of people who comment that NewTek support say "avoid Meraki" - I want to try and find out why.

But be interested in your findings - what switches are you using ?

Thanks

Gary

[DR1]

We have an MX250 as our Gateway, however its only managing three administrative subnets.

Our L3 Core(which is doing 90% of the DHCP) is made up of 3x MS355-24X2 in a Stacking Loop, spread across three racks.

Below this, we have a layer of 3x MS250-24/48, and 4x MS225-48LP

Along with the NDI, we have a significant amount of QLAN, Dante, and AES67 traffic being routed. All of if with A/B fail-over spanning different switches in a stack. 

[Aaron_Wilson]

I suspect they dont prefer Meraki for NDI because Meraki probably has little interest qualifying it. If you look at the list of certified switches from Audinate for Dante, it doesn't include Meraki. But they work just fine.

While I have not done anything with NDI specifically (only Dante), if the core specs pan out you should be OK. Backplane (non-blocking) is probably the most critical.

[GaryShainberg]

@Aaron_Wilson 

I totally agree and my thoughts as well, I have been doing some tests with an MS220-8P and had no issues, and have a MS320-24P that I will use operationally and this should have plenty of "backplane"  and its got the 10G ports 🙂

I still would love to find out why the NewTek support guys appear to say do not use, even though the actually appear to be happy with Unifi switches what are ls not on their "tested" switches.

[Aaron_Wilson]

Do any video guys care about configuring a network switch? Probably not, which is probably why Netgear and others are preferred.

Also, this isn't an insult, as I am one of those "video guys". Been doing audio/video for just about 20 years, I just happen to also belong to our network team and cross pollinated to network. Heck, just the other day I had to spin up a Dante mic and DSP for some work stuff. I grabbed the smallest PoE layer 2 switch I had from the supply drawer (it was a Crestron switch). It powered the devices, passed the packets and the gear is none the wiser. Sure, I could have used one of the Meraki switches I had in the adjacent drawer, but I didn't want to deal with a switch that took longer than 5 seconds to boot...lol

[GIdenJoe]

That's a good point you bring across @Aaron_Wilson .
The same goes for VoIP installers:  Network people are oblivious to VoIP setups and voice guys don't know enough about networking to know what questions to ask a network engineer or give any reason they want a certain design or just point at the network as being faulty while it's their own product that has a problem.

[Mihail]

I have been using NDI for live streaming sports interviews. My LAN setup is:
iPhone 8, using the NDIcam app > MR52 > MS220-8P > Lenovo streamer laptop

The limiting factor of course in this setup is the distance from where the interview takes place to my MR52, so I have not really pushed the boundaries in terms of bandwidth, as I'm running live streams and don't want surprises. 🙂

All in all, my experience has been very positive. You can see an example of video transmitted over NDI here: https://youtu.be/VFm7SgHJ1uo?t=14677