Who said we can’t have nice things…AWS adds NDI outputs to MediaConnect.
This has long been rumored and AWS smartly opted to drop this news right before this year's NAB.
Game changer!
You still need your own discovery server……got you covered on that. I’ve already written a tutorial on how to do that here.
Why am I so exicted? It simple. NDI is the key to production in the cloud. If we can easily get our SRT sources into the cloud, and convert to NDI with no added latency, just about anything is possible.
NDI is the backbone of all of our workflows, and it simply makes everything easier.
Think about this: with basic AWS knowledge, you can now setup live transcoding to NDI in a pay-as-you-go model. (NDI Flows are $1.50/hour in the US regions)
So here's the TL;DR
Ingest from RTP, RTP+FEC, SRT, Zixi, and RIST sources.
Content must be encoded in AVC (h264) or HEVC (h265)
One NDI output can support multiple NDI receivers in the same VPC subnet. (but AWS doesn't give any guidance on how many)
MediaConnect NDI senders are Unicast TCP only (no rUDP love here)
NDI groups aren't supported. (I assume it publishes senders using "Public")
NDI Flows can only output to VPC subnets in the same Region
Supports both 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 encoding, both 8-bit and 10-bit.
Supports frame rates up to 60p at 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94, 60 fps
On initial testing, I setup a vMix instance in my cloud with SRT output to my mediaconnect flow, with latency at 60ms. If you don't know how to properly set SRT latency, see my tutorial here.
A quick measurement in vMix show round trip latency of about 100ms...
...which means only around 40ms were needed used for decoding and transcode.
That is amazing to me. I'm will be testing further, but so far this is very promising.
If you're as excited as I am, check out the AWS NDI docs.
Need a nice web interface to see all that NDI goodness? Jonas Dautel has you covered with DiscoBee: https://lnkd.in/ehv_2VyM
Not sure how to start with cloud production?
Check out my cloud studio basics course to get a simple live streaming switcher up and running in the AWS cloud.
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