Looking using a standalone HDMI IPTV encoder to display live broadcast of an pc screen output to several remote locations ( not all on same LAN ).
I am testing currently with Yawcam and this is ok but wanted to shrink down the hardware requirements at the source location and make it more brainless LOL.
Encoder: TS over IP output, RTSP / HTTP / UDP or RTMP protocol
Question 1: Is it possible to sync clients to the broadcast in android?
Question 2: Have any done this before and is there any major time delays from broadcast to display?
With Yawcam with stream option I connect to the http address and my stream is about 1 sec or less out of time with the source which is ok.
You can’t sync playback with this technology. Simply because the streams don’t contain any timing information and there’s no sync reference anywhere (nor the encoder, nor the player side). To ensure smooth playback the players will buffer an amount of data before its shown on the screen, if they all start at the same time they will appear to be in sync for a while, but sooner or later they will jitter and will lose this. You could do something to look like they are in sync, to re-start periodically playback exactly the same time but again, that’s limited success. As soon as any of the players encounter a couple of miliseconds of bottleneck for any reason, the time delay will be visible.
Delays depend on the amount of buffer players can have. The smaller the buffer the shorter the delay but probability of stuttering playback higher and vice-versa. On a complicated network with various routing scenarios probability of losing sync even higher due to the above reasons.
I suggest to do your tests for several days and get some real-world experience with your environment. Let the players run uninterrupted for several days, and see what happens.
My experience is that Android clients use small buffer, have small delay and seems OK on local LAN (same switch), but interruptions occur if stream goes through public internet. I wish there was a way to increase playback buffer for live streams (but all you have is “Local video”) at media type with no parameters. Maybe an Android system setting somewhere hidden?
Wonder if I ran the stream into a web-server page then ran HTML5 player with embedded code for xibo clients if this would stabilize the playback sync. Its kind of how Yawcam does this and the time delays are generally uniform for me across the clients.
Well that’s pretty far from being in sync, but if that result would satisfy you, fair enough.
You can try maybe video.js, but that still relies on browser settings - at least on the buffering side of things.
How are you going to show this to peope? Same thing the same on all the screens?
If the displays are TV sets, with TV tuners built-in, and you have antenna cabling there (simple RG6 coax cabling) you could use just one single signage player with one HDMI output, and feed that into a DVB modulator like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Edision-HDMI-Modulator-Full-Distribution/dp/B00KBXKJ2A/
This makes signal perfectly in sync on all the displays, and you completely eliminate the need of any clients installed at the displays. Just plug antenna cable straight in and tune the receivers. Full HD resolution.
The encoder system should work, there will be a slight delay (~1-2s depending on your system) so they’ll all get the same ‘program’ everywhere with a very small time difference which probably won’t be noticeable for your purposes (since they’re not even on the same LAN). If they were on the same LAN you could use multicasting to make sure all clients receive data at the ‘same time’