SDI to RF

Consumer grade electronics found in your everyday household have adopted HDMI as their go to connection platform for most media products found near television sets. The problem with HDMI is that it requires encryption and HDCP compliant products to transfer information correctly. While this is ideal for using Blu-Ray players and TV’s set top boxes, this creates massive headaches for audio visual professionals working with products that are not HDMI certified. Most notably these products come in the form of HD-video cameras that are shooting unencrypted high definition video in the form of 1.485 Gbt/s. More importantly it’s difficult to take a live feed from one of these camera’s and distribute that image all over an auditorium, stadium, house of worship, school, or conference center(for live events).

Uncompressed DVB camera feeds that feature HD-SDI video output are much more tangible for concert events than using consumer grade HDMI cameras. However the distribution of HD-SDI video had the necessity of being complicated and burdensome with special HD-SDI converters and hardware adapters so that the video footage streams could be viewed Live without spending enormous amounts of money. Now there’s a much simpler and easier to broadcast the video using an HD-SDI to RF encoder modulator. By running the video footage through existing coax that’s probably already built into the infrastructure of the venue, can make life a lot easier.

The H-4SDI-QAM-IPLL has the ideal solution for these needs.

or 8 channel HDMI / SDI H-HYBRID-RF-8

First the Thor encoder will take your raw DVB-HDSDI video and encode it to QAM, next you can set this video feed on a particular channel of your choice on any standard RF range. In effect you can use 4 HD-SDI camera’s shooting live video on 4 separate QAM channels being distributed to hundreds of TV’s in your infrastructure.

House of Worship has a demanding need to project Live video of their congregations in super-auditoriums. The problem has always been that they can do this rather easily, except for the delay in encoding equipment has always created audio and video gaps. Thor’s encoding equipment now offers Low Latency in their hardware and firmware creating an efficient vehicle for transmitting video feeds onto televisions through RF distribution. In the past encoders would usually take up to 2 full seconds to encoder the unencrypted high definition 1080i video quality streams. Now with efficient engineering you can stream SD-SDI video at about 70ms delay and HD-SDI at 110ms delay. Using high speed digital camera’s running a clock on a clear stream versus an encoded stream, we can see that the stability in timing never diminishes and is barely identifiable by the human eye.

Recent applications of this same unit have been ideal for sports venues and stadiums. In some cases using a 4 channel modulator with a mix of HD-SDI and HDMI channels can result in a single platform that can be modulated to play on top of an existing RF channel lineup with the addition of your live HD-SDI streams on 2 channels and your own customized digital signage on another 2 channels. It’s rare that you can find such an efficient platform that encodes, modulates, and has an output to RF so that you can view these channels on any TV that has a built in QAM tuner (all newer sets include these).

Presently around the world, cities and ownership groups are spending over a billion dollars on new state of the art stadiums for events. These stadiums come equipped with state of the art headend equipment rooms that enable every visitor to view the games over hundreds of television sets located all over the ball parks and arena’s. Some newer stadium builds are starting to incorporate some fiber into their newest construction jobs, however thousands of existing stadiums are already wired with copper for easy RF distribution to all of the television sets already plastered to every wall, ceiling, and bar/food area in these buildings. In order for these venues to properly place live DVB streams from the game as well as incorporating marketing and advertising media through digital signage, its crucially important to feature high end broadcast encoding equipment as well as a means to distribute that unencrypted HD-SDI signal in combination with digital signage using HDMI. HD-SDI to RF has become an invaluable resource in demonstrating this ability at the lowest cost available to design engineers.

Thor Fiber has been able to implement various inputs of HD-SDI, HDMI, YpBr, CVBS and analog inputs into an encoder modulator that will be able to implement every necessary piece of equipment stadium’s need to transmit those data streams over RF.