[Released] AVPro DeckLink - Broadcast video input and output for Unity

Hi,
here's audio samples of capture in DesktopVideo and unity (audio set to default and best latency in unity audio settings)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8boquhysz2zjqc/recordings_161114.zip?dl=0
Thanks!

 

Thanks for the files! The fixes to your reported issues are in the current version. Should be released sometime later this week after we have done a bit of testing

Cheers,

 

Hi!
Amazing job guys!
One question: any idea if you plug-in could work capturing from UltraStudio devices? UltraStudio Express specifically.
Thanks a lot for your help!

 

Thanks!

As long as the capture card is supported by the current version of desktop video, it should be supported by our plugin. We offer a fully featured watermarked trial version that you can download here.

 

Hi, any news on when the release with the audio fix will be released? Thanks!

 

Hi,

Sorry for the delay! The update is done. Sadly Andrew is sick so I'm not entirely sure when he will be able to upload, however, if you pm me your e-mail, I'll be happy to make the package for you and e-mail it over.

Cheers,

 

Hi All,

AVPro DeckLink version 1.2.1 has just been released!

You can find the updated version on the Asset Store and the free trial version / demos on our website.

Changes include:

Bug fixes

• Moved audio input logic from c# script to native plugin. This should both fix the glitchy audio input, as well as improve performance slightly
• DeckLinkSettings now refreshes the plugin before each run so that changes get reflected

Thanks,

 

Hello everyone!
I am sorry to barge in on the forum like this but I am out of options ...
I am working on a charity project paid by me and few volunteers and we are using Intensity Shuttle for USB3.
As we can not afford to buy the plugin at this point I am asking if someone could compile my Unity project to .exe file.
We have some budget about this so we will try to answer the fee of anyone that is willing to do it.
In case anyone is interested I am attaching a link to the project:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7qu0ehw3jnfh0dx/CapturePreview.zip?dl=0

We are pushing for this to finish ASAP as it is a project to help education of yungsters with special needs and we are already way too late with the school year

Thank you in advance!

Best regards:
Sergey Stoyanov

 

Hi Sergey,

We have replied to you via email. Thanks,

 

Hi All,

AVPro DeckLink version 1.3.0 has just been released!

You can find the updated version on the Asset Store and the free trial version / demos on our website.

Changes include:

Features

• RGBX10, RGBX10_LE, and RGB10 formats are now supported for playback.
• Added the ability to flip the X and Y axis on DeckLinkInput components. 04_InputExplorerDemo.unity also updated to reflect this.

Bugfixes

• Fixed access violation crash when frame drops occurred (typically when pausing the unity system, or stepping through code).
• Fixed access violation crash that sometimes occurred when shutting down Unity
• V210 pixel format capture now flips correctly on later versions of Unity
• Fixed capture on some previous Unity versions where only 1 pixel was being displayed

Thanks,

 

Hi,
I m new to the unity environment and i am trying to send an augmented reality scene made with artooklit for unity to a capture/output card (blackmagic decklink) without success, on the pc screen it works but on the decklink card output i have a black screen,
I use the avpro decklink package to manage the blackmagic decklink.
config: Windows 7 SP1/ unity 5.4.3f1/ artoolkit 5.3.2/ avpro for decklink 1.3.0/blackmagic desktop video 10.6.8
can you please help me on that, how can i send the scene to the decklink card card?
Thanks in advance

 

Hi houta97,

Replied to your e-mail (at least I think it was yours, if it wasn't just let me know).

Cheers,

 

Hi,im using OutputDemo to test sending stream to a Blackmagic Decklink mini Monitor 4K card.
but when i debug to the red area, numDevices is 0. The result is no device can be selected...
Please help!Thank you!

 

For anyone else experiencing the same problem, there is a bug in the current version (1.3.0) where output only capture cards are not being picked up. The fix has been added and will be in the next version (1.3.1).

 

Hi All,

AVPro DeckLink version 1.3.1 has just been released!

You can find the updated version on the Asset Store and the free trial version / demos on our website.

Changes include:

Features

• Added ability to perform device and mode search with values specified at runtime

Bugfixes

• Fixed issue where output-only card (such as DeckLink Mini Monitor) failed to initialise
• Fixed audio output deadlock issue
• Fixed bug where the mode was being displayed incorrectly in the DeckLinkOutput component's preview section

Thanks,

 

Hello,

I need video streaming from a webcam. The audio is not important. However I need a very low latency - less than 1 second end-to-end to a mobile app in iOS. Assume the end users are in USA.
Is it possible to know what latency I will get?

Thanks!

 

Hi Revenues,

AVPro DeckLink has only a few frames of latency between the camera capture and the frames being displayed in unity, so there shouldn't be an issue there. It however only works for BMD capture cards, and only on Windows currently. We do have plans for an OSX version as there seems to be some demand for it, however, this will probably only happen later in the year.

Can you elaborate a bit more on your use-case? From how I understand things, you want to stream video obtained from some camera across the internet? If this is the case, this plugin is probably not what you want since it doesn't do any encoding, and merely works with the raw frame data. A better approach might be to use a camera that supports some streaming protocol, such as RTSP or HLS, and then connect a video player to that on your mobile app in order to obtain a video feed.

We have another plugin purely for video playback called AVPro Video which might suit your needs more as it can play these video streams. That being said, I can't really comment on what latency you might get without any more information.

 

Hey All,
We're working on the next update to AVPro DeckLink - if anyone has any suggestions let us know here on this forum or at unitysupport@renderheads.com, thanks

 

Andrew,

I replied in the avprolivecamera thread asking if I could get the audio out of avprolivecamera plugin. Unfortunately time is of the essence so I tried the trial version of this and it seems to work well! so we have purchased decklink.

There is one major problem though. The audio we are getting out of our capture card into unity is crackly, I thought this was part of the trial version, we are using a BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4K, playback seems to be solid. It's just the audio that's coming out.

For our setup we are streaming videos from a brightsign that holds the videos and the computer has the black magic card installed.

Audio playback was fine when using your other plugin "avprovideo".

I hate to rush you, but we are working within a strict deadline and this needs to be resolved for us to keep moving forward. If resolving this isn't doable, please let me know, so I can try and find another solution. Thanks!

 

Hi Adkaros,

It is bad timing - being the Easter weekend nobody is in the office until Tuesday. I'm away at a demo scene event the whole weekend so I can't help you either. Sorry that we can't help immediately.

 

Hi Andrew,
AVPro DeckLink is support delay input video signal?
example，there are two input video signal,A and B. AVPro DeckLink can delay A Video 2 frame,at the same time,delay B Video 5 frame.

 

Hi tichilv,
No, AVPro DeckLink doesn't have any feature to delay incoming frames. It displays them as soon as they arrive. You could of course add your own buffering to achieve this though.
Could you tell me more about why this feature is needed? Is it to get 2 different input streams in sync?

Thanks,

 

Hi Adkaros,

I just did some testing with the intensity pro card in our office and the audio input seemed fine. Could you email over your unity audio settings to unitysupport@renderheads.com? A recording of the audio would also be very helpful.

Also as sanity checks, could you also check if the audio is working correctly inside blackmagic express, and that desktop video is updated to version 10.8.5.

Thanks.

 

Hi Sunrise,

I'm not able to send you over anything at this moment as I'm out the office for travel. Might be able to get one of our other guys to.

Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but we are also streaming the video from a brightsign. I'll respond back when I can. The only problem was that the audio was just low quality and had crackling.

Thanks.

 

Hi Adkaros,

Although I haven't tested the plugin with a brightsign (or other digital signage devices) before, I don't believe that should be an issue. I'm not too sure what would cause a "crackling" sound, as the plugin merely reads in the captured pcm audio data, and sends it over to Unity.

That being said, if the crackling sounds more like discontinuities in the audio, it's possible that there is either some mismatch in sample rates (although I don't think this should be a thing as I'm pretty sure the sound is being resampled to 48khz), or something in the audio settings is causing Unity to sometimes request audio data before it has been buffered, resulting in periodic audio glitches.

Either ways, the extra information should definitely be able to help us narrow down the possible causes.

Cheers,

 

Here is the unity audio settings for our project



Let me know if you needed something else or if I got you the wrong settings, thanks sunrise!

 

Hi Adkaros,

Those settings certainly look fine. Do you get any improvement if you switch the dsp buffer settings to best performance?
Further info that may help is a sample of the audio crackling, audio quality in media express, and frequency of the crackling.

Cheers,

 

Sunrise, thanks for your replies, we have since moved over to using a different computer and it seems to have resolved our issue. I'll let you know If I have any more problems with it!

 

Fantastic to hear you resolved it Please don't hesitate to let us know if you have any other issues

 

Hi AndrewRH ,i use the AVProDeckLink to do outputing work by decklink card, the problem is i can't find the device in decklink output component. but the sdi inputing works well,i don't know where i did wrong...

 

i use only one decklink card . do i need two cards? one do inputing ,the other do outputing?

 

Hi Bigamao,

I believe this depends on your card, and whether or not it supports simultaneous capture and playback. What model of BMD card are you currently using?

 

i use this card ,thx!

 

Hmm that's strange... I believe that card should support both full duplex mode as well as 2 inputs and 2 outputs if I'm not mistaken. If you check "show explorer" on the DeckLinkOutput component, does the explorer show any available devices? Also can you tell me what version of AVProDeckLink you are currently using?

 

Oh another thing to check is your version of Desktop Video. What version of that are you currently running?

 

Thank you SunriseRH! this is the desktop video and sdk version,and i use AVProDeckLink 1.30 now.

i use unity5.6 win7x64. and do you have AVProDeckLink user doc?

 

When i use the Output demo to test if the Decklink works well, the error occurs like above,but when i only use the Input demo ,all works well.

I try the version 1.31 demo today ,the same problem...

 

Hi,

AVProVideo uses Desktop Video 10.8.5, so you should update to that version. Please let us know if you still have problems after the update

Edit: The user docs for AVProDeckLink should be inside the package

 

Ok! i will try soon!

 

I tried and succeeded！ I think the reason is the old desktop video version. Thanks a lot!

 

Great to hear We are going to add a note in the documentation for this, as many people seem to have this issue.

Thanks for your patience.

 

New problem came to me... when i run the output demo for about two hours ,unity crashed and i received this

 

i use desktop video 10.8.5 ,AVProDeckLink 1.31 trial,decklink 4k extreme,unity 5.6.

 

Hmm not sure why that is happening. I'll run some tests so long to see if I can replicate on my side. How many times has this happened to you?

Edit: Also what version of Windows are you currently running?

 

Every time it happens and i use windows7.
if i only use input demo ,there is no problem.

 

So I just ran the output demo on Windows 10 for 24h and didn't detect any leak or runaway threads. I'll try get hold of a Windows 7 machine and do some testing there.

I also did some reading on possible causes for that message, and there have been reports of it being caused by antivirus software, so perhaps you can try temporarily uninstalling your antivirus software just to see if the problem still persists.

 

Hey guys, @SunriseRH @AndrewRH

i'm looking for a possibility to delay the video input by a certain amount of frames. I tried a couple of things based on the documentation but it didnt work out as planned.

best

 

Hi,

I did a bunch of testing on a windows 7 machine and wasn't able to replicate. Have you tried uninstalling your antivirus to see if that fixes things?

 

Hi,

I don't believe the plugin is capable of this at the moment. What you can do however to get a few frames delay is to have an array of textures which you copy your DeckLinkInput texture to every frame. You can then feed that texture to some material or object which then displays it.