NDI or Dante? A Quick Comparison Between the Two and Which is Right for You!

In today's video, Matt takes a look at NDI and Dante and some considerations that someone who is interested in either technology might want to make. There's a lot to think about when it comes to those two technologies, and both accomplish different goals even while occupying a similar space.

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[jonsharpe]

Great Video! really helped me understand both their roles and uses. Was just doing a course on Dante via AVIXA, and did a quick Google to try and understand why I would use one over the other and this explained it all briliantly and in very plain English. thanks man!

[Norbert_Haupt]

Thanks for this explanation + comparison!

[FalkJ]

Thanks for the overview, that's really helpful! God bless you!

[VideoColServices]

Is the latency on Dante low enough for imag?

[keptkozy]

Couldn't make it through the video. That hiss is brutal man. I'm a firm believer that you don't need crazy expensive gear to make good content, but when the subject matter is actually AV, I think taking some time to get the sound in order would lend some credibility to your words.

Framing is a bit to close, the white balance is ice cold and the light needs more diffusio. Maybe an actual background as well, but all that is secondary to the sound.

Good luck man.

[wowpeter]

NDI also support sync via PTP. It is just that it is only support via Advance SDK which require licensing and pay a royalty to NDI / Vizrt. So technically speaking, NDI video can also be sync just that a lot of the lower cost solutions out there does not implement the Sync feature.

As for Dante AV-H, although it is claim to be a software based solutions, that's not entirely true at the moment. There are no official SDK that software developer can design software that can directly output Dante AV. Dante AV-H is still very much targetting hardware OEM who can use DanteAV-H to rewrite new firmware or software for their SOC to output Dante to allow wider adoption. THis is similar to NDI HX1, 2 and 3 which uses H264 and 265 codec. However, with Dante AV-H, you lose the common time clock and sync feature. Where as with NDI, if software developer or hardware developer who want to support it, they can have PTP Sync incorporated even with NDI HX 1/2/3.

Dante AV for Video will only ever be good for the old school AV professional who like plug and play setup. But anything that are using software solutions to create shows (Pixera, Watchout, Disguise, vMix, OBS, etc etc), any of these people will never gonna be able to use Dante AV because there are simple no software layer to allow directly input and output from a computer into their media system. In the future, someone might make a PCI-E Dante AV capture card and you can use that to feed Dante video into media solutions, but then you are going back into the world of video capture back into some kind of UVC driver [absolute madness if that were to happen]. (note: I am sure Dante is full capable to offer an SDK, but this fundamentally goes against their business model, which is to sell you their chipset to manufactures who makes their hardware).

So in todays world where everything is going the direction of software define architecture. NDI is the way to go really. Dante as a solution although will be easier to use for those who are not software savve, but the Dante AV solution are limited by Audinate business model.

[iamnotgroot]

Too bad it doesn’t support Dante which most pro/prosumer audio gear supports these days. The only thing I have that uses NDI is some PTZ cameras that aren’t even on the same network with all the Dante stuff.