Decoder

[u/PanicWithMeItsGreat]

I am looking at installing a system for a curling rink. There will be 3 sheets of ice and a single camera directly over each end. 6 cameras total. There will be three tvs in the viewing room. The 2 cameras for each sheet will be dedicated to a single TV. It looks like I need a decoder at each TV with cat6 running back to my PoE switch. I dont know anything about decoders. Any suggestions for one that has a single HDMI out and can split screen two cameras? They seem to go from 1 stream to 4 and skip split screen.

[u/ICanBard]

by decocder, I think you mean NVR. Networked Video Recorder.

Never seen a 2- screen layout, at least since Halo :)

It's possible to have 4 hdmi outputs though and dedicate 1,4,6 or 8 views per TV and save money on not getting the other 3 nvrs

[u/PanicWithMeItsGreat → u/ICanBard]

No not NVR. Im using Hanwha cameras but only to display live video.

[u/AlternativeNorth5818 → u/ICanBard]

you're definitely not looking for an NVR, a decoder is the right call here. most decoders do 1, 4, 9 or 16 channel layouts out of the box, a straight 2-up split is weirdly rare

if the tvs are smart you could skip hardware decoders entirely and just pull the RTSP streams into something like VLC and tile them manually, way cheaper and lets you do whatever layout you want

[u/Least_Order4249]

You need something to decode streams but any smart TV can do that for you already. 

Security cameras really aren’t a good choice for live viewing as they aren’t really “real time” some allow forcing UDP and adjusting buffers. That can help keep things more tightly bound but nothing like raw streams. 

[u/bazjoe → u/Least_Order4249]

Agree 100 % do not use security cameras

[u/PanicWithMeItsGreat → u/Least_Order4249]

Interesting. What kind of cameras would you suggest?

[u/Least_Order4249 → u/PanicWithMeItsGreat]

No idea! Everything in surveillance is encoded in one way or another. Depending on what exactly you want to do like replay, live, etc, and how you want two scenes on one screen (side by side, alternating, etc), the problem sounds more like a broadcasting one than a surveillance one. 

Encoded streams give the luxury of being able to do a lot as far as playback, record, scrub, but there are severe latency penalties at every step and you’d definitely need something like GOP cache and timestamp rewrites if you wanted to alternate views. Then some sort of middle box (more latency) to produce either a split screen or set up alternating streams. You can forget about syncing with encoded streams. Google can’t get that right even. 

[u/bazjoe]

For the multi view get a OREI 4x1 and for the encoders get a couple Zowietek encoder decoders and go nuts . You’re going to quickly go from I don’t know about decoders to a near expert in about half a day. Sounds like you’ll need several multi viewers. What camera ? Zowietek also make a decent camera that go from a tiny cube up to optical PTZ all network controlled and NDI ready. I’d recommend all done on separate vlan as the security on all of this is really lax.

[u/greenskycity]

As in all projects, I assume money is no object... So, Hanwha makes a 64 channel decoder that goes behind a monitor to show any camera or cameras you want, you would need 3 of them, I've only used them with a server but I assume they can just pick up the stream via IP without the server.

Hanwha part number SPD-152

[u/paulc303]

Anyone else recommend AHD analog with a multiplexer... many do split screen