Author Topic: Wireless HDMI video switching  (Read 3193 times)

hans

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Wireless HDMI video switching
« on: October 25, 2015, 06:27:07 PM »
This is a part hardware, part software question. Quite a few folks in the pinball community now are doing these video setups where you can see the playfields of the games (and scores and player cams) and feeding them into Twitch. As far as I know many of them are using camcorders hooked up with HDMI cables to a central switching source and them a handful of video cards on a PC/laptop.

I'm wondering if cameras are out there these days that I could rig up an ad-hoc wifi solution instead of having to drag cables all over the place. I'd like to try something out with my local league but would want/need to be able to move the rig fairly quickly from game to game and moving all of the supporting cables just would not be a solution.

Is this kind of setup available these days yet? Seems like it should be but I haven't heard anyone talk about it yet.
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hans

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Re: Wireless HDMI video switching
« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2015, 06:30:37 PM »
Ideally of course it'd be great to be able to stream them all at the same time but I think bandwidth limitations would make that very difficult so I was wondering about the centralized stream. Although I do think it would be nice to be able to record it all for later viewing as well.
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jkim

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Re: Wireless HDMI video switching
« Reply #2 on: October 28, 2015, 04:46:20 PM »
If you find out, please update. I haven't done any research into it, but it would be mighty useful now that you've brought it up.

Perspective

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Re: Wireless HDMI video switching
« Reply #3 on: October 28, 2015, 09:54:04 PM »
They sell hd WiFi baby monitors and security cameras, maybe subjecting like that would work?

hans

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Re: Wireless HDMI video switching
« Reply #4 on: October 29, 2015, 02:33:25 AM »
The problem with many of those that I've seen is they won't keep up with the "action" of pinball. They're usually not fast cameras and I'd need that for tracking the ball fly around. I'm going to be looking into some options so we'll see what's out there. Another possibility I've been looking at is running a set of RPIs with cameras (see what the quality is like) and possibly writing some software to network them together. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to accomplish what I'm looking for without some custom software.
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