by Kathryn Taub

Houses of worship are a unique vertical for pro AV in the sense that highly technical installations are often run by volunteers whose AV experience is limited at best. They need the most error-proof AV systems available so they can focus on delivering content to the congregation — whether they’re in the room or viewing remotely — in support of that week’s worship message. Dante has long-been the industry standard for audio transport with over 3,500 devices supporting the Dante protocol, but Dante AV (Dante video) is still relatively new and rapidly growing in the AV-over-IP market. Dante AV is a family of video solutions comprising both hardware and software products that serve the needs of both in-house video distribution (Dante AV Ultra) and H.26x streaming (Dante AV-H). Much like their audio counterparts, video flows/streams for both Dante AV Ultra and Dante AV-H are managed via Dante Controller.

The Power and Simplicity of Dante Controller

Dante Controller software acts as a one-stop shop for managing AV routing — with separate, independently routable streams for audio and video. This implementation eliminates breakout boxes, adapters, and cables, and reduces the processing overhead required for audio-only or video-only products.

Once the system has been set up, the signal routing information is stored in the Dante-enabled devices themselves, allowing the Dante ecosystem to run without any connected computers. Users don’t have to worry about re-establishing routes when a device is moved or power cycled — it “just works,” saving time, worry and setup costs.

Dante AV Ultra for In-House Video Distribution

Dante AV Ultra offers easy-to-use configuration, low latency, and tight time synchronization between endpoints, making it ideal for real-time events like worship services with the exactitude for clean effects transitions, video walls and multi-image projections. Dante AV Ultra supports both one-to-one transmission (unicast) and network fan out (multicasting), allowing more than one receiving device and channel per transmitting channel. Dante AV Ultra transmits over 1 Gbps connections, so it’s likely that you can use the existing network infrastructure in the house of worship to add video for substantial installation savings. Similar to Dante audio devices, you can expand the Dante video portion of the ecosystem simply by connecting additional video endpoints to the network.

Dante AV-H for Streaming Applications

Recently announced, Dante AV-H is embedded software that can be added by manufacturers to their Ethernet-enabled H.264/H.265 cameras, encoders, and decoders, effectively turning them into Dante AV endpoints. Integrators and end users gain all the benefits of Dante, such as automatic network discovery and IP addressing, one-click routing with Dante Controller, and eliminating the need for fixed point-to-point connections. Best of all, manufacturers don’t need to make any hardware changes to new or existing products to implement Dante AV-H, and we expect to see rapid adoption of this technology.

Dante Video Tools for the PC

Dante Studio is a suite of PC software tools comprising Dante Video TX, Dante Video RX, and Dante Video Viewer that allow you to use all Dante AV products in video production workflows without requiring additional hardware. After installing Dante Studio, your PC appears automatically in the routing view of Dante Controller. The PC will show one video transmitting channel (Dante Video TX) and one video receiving channel (Dante Video RX).

With Dante Video TX, the entire screen of your PC can be shared to the network as a Dante AV flow. If you have multiple displays connected, you can select the specific screen to share. Dante Video TX supports 1080p resolution at up to 60 frames per second.

The receiving channel, Dante Video RX, enables Windows PCs to receive video simply and seamlessly from any Dante AV-enabled source. Dante Video RX allows you to use streams from Dante AV cameras and encoders with popular PC editing and production applications such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and Adobe Premiere, or connect to conferencing solutions like Zoom, Teams and more.

Dante Video Viewer is a standalone application to monitor video signals coming from products on the Dante AV network. With this tool users can monitor Dante AV signals without the need for a dedicated video-related application. Additionally, Video Viewer can be used to display a video flow full screen on a PC, turning it into a Dante AV receiver.

Keeping the Focus on What’s Important

The Dante AV family offers a significant number of benefits to both integrators and end users. For in-house video distribution, the ease of configuration, low latency and tight time synchronization make Dante AV Ultra a very compelling AV solution for houses of worship. Since Dante AV Ultra manages flow/stream synchronization “under the hood”, end users don’t have to worry about it. Instead, volunteer AV operators at houses of worship and even seasoned pros at larger venues can focus on what’s most important — delivering an effective AV production that elevates the worship service. For house of worships who already stream or intend to stream their worship services, Dante AV-H allows Ethernet-enabled cameras and encoders to act as Dante AV endpoints on the network, with the requisite benefits of automatic network discovery, one-click routing with Dante Controller, and more. Dante AV delivers the right data to the right place at the right time, optimizing network cost, bandwidth, and data efficiencies.

Available Dante AV Products

Audinate’s video products are rapidly gaining adoption within the AV-over-IP market, with 26 OEMs licensed and in the process of developing and delivering video-enabled products to integrators and end users. Bolin introduced the first Dante AV Ultra-enabled PTZ cameras, the D412 (4K60) and D220 (Full HD). The cameras integrate into an existing Dante audio ecosystem and can be configured using Dante Controller. Bolin also launched the D20 Series Dante AV Transceiver, which can be programmed as an encoder or decoder, and the Bolin D10H Dante AV Decoder, a networked AV decoder that outputs baseband video HDMI 2.0, which not only works with Bolin Dante AV PTZ cameras but also works with other manufacturers’ Dante AV Ultra devices that are connected to the Dante ecosystem. And that’s just the beginning — there will be many new products from several manufacturers available in 2023.

Kathryn Taub is the Product Marketing Manager – Networked Video at Audinate