The WEIRDEST Video Card We’ve EVER Seen..

[Fubariam]

This card has wrecked and blown my mind wholly crap 

[GodAtum]

So will it play games??

[Lady Fitzgerald]

So how much would this little darlin' cost me? The manufacturer seems to be too ashamed to advertise the price.

[Surf]

It would be great to see an unbiased pros and cons comparison of ProAV distance transport (AVoIP, SDVoE, HDBaseT, AVB and DANTE) on this channel

[BachChain]

How is this better than a regular card with something like optical HDMI?

[power666]

On 3/7/2019 at 3:16 PM, Surf said:

It would be great to see an unbiased pros and cons comparison of ProAV distance transport (AVoIP, SDVoE, HDBaseT, AVB and DANTE) on this channel

 

HDbaseT uses category cabling but the raw signal going over the wiring is not ethernet compliant.  Thus it is its own thing which needs specialized switcher to do any sort of routing.  It can do uncompressed, low latency (sub one frame) 4K30.  The 4K60 implementations out there drop down to 4:2:0 chroma sampling or they leverage display stream compress (DSC).  HDbaseT-IP is however different and is yet another AV-over-IP (AVoIP) implementation.

 

SDVoE is a form of AVoIP.  SDVoE can do good high quality 4K video because it requires a 10 Gbit Ethernet connection.  Most of those are also based around fiber.  There is a codec involved with SDVoE but since it requires 10 Gbit, the only time it kicks in is with 4K60 4:4:4 video.  The codec part is important as it can scale upward to 8K resolution.  I will say that on paper, I am impressed about this Netgear M4300 switch is that it has SDVoE encoder and decoder modules with HDMI 2.0 ports.  Regardless of what format wins the AVoIP war, the core switches will look like the M4300.  SDVoE is also nice as it is being promoted as a consortium solution.  The downside is that SDVoE doesn't have any really big players pushing it from the AV side of things (it does have several name brand IT backers though).  

 

Dante is currently audio only (Audinate did announce a M-JPEG2000) AVoIP produce at ISE last month but that is sort of separate from the audio side.). It has become the de facto standard for moving real time professional/production audio over a network.  AES67 is the fully interoperable version of Dante that lacks a few minor features.  Audinate, the company behind Dante, fully support AES67 in their controller application and oddly enough, SDVoE. 

 

AVB does both audio and video but doesn't really define much on the video side.  Biamp leverages M-JPEG2000 for their video codec.  It supports both 1 Gbit and 10 Gbit for video.  Unfortunately you can't do both 1 Gbit and 10 Gbit simultaneously (IE leverage a 8 Gbit video stream for local presentation and then simultaneously send a 800 Mbit stream for transport across a bottle necked corporate network). Biamp's end points also support decoding of H.264 which is a nice feature to have if need to bring in another stream.  The big catch for AVB is that it requires special Ethernet switches to handle a deterministic connection.  That essentially guarantees a maximum time to reach the destination.  Conceptually this is a higher order form of quality of service.  On the switch side most newer high speed switches are incorporating AVB features (mainly because high frequency trading outfits love them) includes those at higher data rates.  Hence there are 40 Gbit and 100 Gbit Ethernet switches that support AVB out today, just no encoders or  decoders to bring in video (yet).   For the audio side, AVB has been slowly pushed out of the market because of Dante and AES67.  One of the under reported things about AVB is that all recent Macs with Ethernet (or Apple's Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter) support AVB.  The iMac Pro is capable of moving 1024 audio channels in and out of it.  Like SDVoE, AVB is a consortium effort by the AVnu alliance but only Biamp is really pushing it in the AV market.  However, AVB has seen an uptick in interest from the automotive market as several companies are looking at it as a method to pass data between sensors (including camera video feeds).

 

Crestron offers their NVX solution which leverages 1 Gbit Ethernet.  It was initially based off of M-JPEG2000 but they switched to something proprietary which they are calling Pixel Perfect to improve the quality of slow motion/static or complex images.  Yep, they pretty much admitted that M-JPEG2000 was horrible for 4K.  I've personally seen the older M-JPEG2000 solutions and yeah, you could tell where details were being removed.  The best consumer analogy would be comparing a 4K Blu-ray to a 4K Netflix stream.  Like everything else Crestron, it integrates well with their other controller and audio products.  The first generation of NVX products were based around an Intel/Altera FGPA solution which could  do decoding or encoding but not both simultaneously (reboot required to switch modes).  The second generation of NVX boxes have dedicated encoder and decoder endpoints.  The decoders also support H.264 viewing of streams.  NVX also is able to act as a USB 2.0 extender for KVM functionality.  However, if you do want use the full bandwidth of USB 2.0, the video stream would only be able to occupy 400 Mbit itself.  

 

Extron offers their own AVoIP solution that leverages a custom developed codec.  This is a recent announcement and I haven't seen it but given the compression ratio required for 4K over 1 Gbit and every other vendor's resolution so far, I don't think this will change anything the than adding yet another 'standard' for AVoIP.

 

Samsung purchased the Harmon Group a few years ago who had which purchased AMX a year before that they had purchased SVSI who was an early player in the video over IP segment.  SVSI's products have several endpoints based around specific codecs which include M-JPEG2000 and even H.264.  I've only seen earlier generation of these produces before they picked up the AMX branding and for 1920 x 1080 they were OK but explicitly could not do 4K.  Later iterations did pick up 4K60 support but have the same quality over 1 Gbit issues that every other vendor has.   The series of acquisitions initially had promise that the SVSI technology they pioneered would be implemented in Samsung's commercial/professional products (ie business displays) but it seems that Samsung is winding down parts of Harmon Group.  Right now I'd avoid these as the long term outlook is very cloudy.  

 

Altona offers their Omnistream solution for AVoIP which does do something different:  leverages the Dirac codec.  It is fine for HD content over 1 Gbit Ethernet but it can't do 4K with high quality.

 

NewTek has their NDI solutions for video over the network using a proprietary algorithm. Adoption is based around professional live video production.  However, NewTek has opened up the spec to be royalty free to help spur adoption across other manufacturers.  They also promote plug-ins for other manufacturer's software to bring in NDI feeds for production.  Also NewTek is sane in that they recommend a 10 Gbit connection for 4K video but HD is fine over 1 Gbit.  

 

SMPTE2022 is a production video standard for encapsulating SDI video over Ethernet.  It is uncompressed and requires 10 Gbit.  However, 2.5 and 5 Gbit Ethernet speeds should be able to handle HD-SDI (1.5 Gbit) and 3G-SDI (3 Gbit) streams respectively.  Extensions are being proposed to encapsulate 12G-SDI and the coming 24G-SDI over 25 Gbit and 40 Gbit Ethernet but I doubt those will really go anywhere.  As a production focused spec, it won't see wide spread adoption in its pure form but being from a standard's body, this could be what emerges as a temporary interoperable standard between manufacturers.

 

TL;DR

 

As far as quality goes, if any vendor claims to be able to do high quality, low latency 4K picture over a 1 Gbit connection, they are lying to you.   For just 1920 x 1080, 1 Gbit Ethernet is sufficient.  AVoIP technologies that can do 10 Gbit can produce high quality 4K video.  10 Gbit solutions are great but incur the higher costs of 10 Gbit networking.  What I am personally eager to see are 2.5 and 5 Gbit networking support coming to AVoIP solutions.  The compression ratio to do 4K60 4:4:4 is less of an issue for quality at 2.5 and 5 Gbit data rates.

 

Also while the M-JPEG2000 codec is used across multiple manufacturers, none of the solutions are interoperable with each other.  Conceptually you should be able to exchange data streams but there is exceedingly heavy vendor lock in right now.  I see this the greatest barrier to adoption of any AVoIP solution.  The market right now is over saturated with proprietary implementations and it is battle for market share.  I do see 4K60 being the breaking point with products stuck at 1 Gbit are going to suffer.

 

Distances of any IP solutions is limited by the physical medium of the IP network itself.  For category cable, you can get ~330 ft (100m) before hitting the switch.  For most installs, this is fine.  Fiber of course can go further with optional all the way into tens of miles between needing a repeater.

[power666]

12 hours ago, BachChain said:

How is this better than a regular card with something like optical HDMI?

 

Easier to get through walls and conduit for installs.  Fiber HDMI cables are horrible for this as they generally have fixed ends which makes pulling them more difficult than something you can terminate yourself.

[power666]

On 3/4/2019 at 3:45 AM, Sacredsock said:

Also, is it possible to pass other graphics through to this magic card?

 

Nope due to being a glorified MXM carrier card.  The outputs of the MXM card go through the edge connector.  Those outputs are routed on the carrier card to the HDbaseT transceivers.  Conceptually you could swap MXM cards but there are some quirks (nVidia GPUs only support four outputs where as the card in the video has six.)

 

If you wanted to go that distance, you can get external extenders that'll accept an ordinary HDMI input.

[nickmurphy]

Hi all, I've got a proper question about this as my workplace is looking into getting one for testing purposes after I suggested it. This would be a better solution to the current setup. Once ordered will this 'gpu' ship with receivers or would these have to be bought separately ? Didn't see this information on their website. 

[Alorise]

On 3/4/2019 at 5:13 AM, wellend said:

@GabenJr Can you run multiple cards in one system to get more outputs?

No the card does not support crossfire or SLI.

[Alorise]

On 3/10/2019 at 1:11 AM, BachChain said:

How is this better than a regular card with something like optical HDMI?

Well it can carry signals over longer distances. Unlike HDMI CAT 5 can run a signal over a 100 meters.