BIRDDOG Play 4K NDI Player

I bought four of these units and half of them did not work. I contacted the manufactuer and they had me try several things and finally told me to return them to Amazon. I returned the 2 bad ones and was refunded 6% of what I paid for them. AED100 refund. I paid AE1538.61. I would not recommend that you do business with them. Bad quality products and crooked.

We bought one of these for our church to run a display in the lobby for announcements. We have a Mac mini that allows for two outputs and this allows us to add another one really easy. It runs through our normal network (probably not recommended but we have a small footprint). We run an NDI output from ProPresenter and set the announcement layer on it. Sometimes it seems a bit finicky, and I think the order in which you turn things on may matter, but 9/10 times it just picks up the signal no problem.

When it works, it works. However, I’ve now bought three of these units and all 3 have gone bad within months and had to be RMA. One got dropped from 3 feet and broke, you would think these were better made. I don’t have the heart to send in the one that got dropped. If you plan on setting these up every week for say church then tearing down, I would not recommend. If you never touch it after you install it, then maybe.

******************* Updated Review ******************* Well, it looks like the majority of the video stuttering was not caused by the Birddog Play. I found that Ecamm's NDI output was mostly responsible for the poor performance. When I display NDI from other ProPresenter or Proclaim, the output is smoother. However, a barely noticeable stutter still remains. On another note, the unit has an audio jack and usb port on the side. I was hoping the audio jack would split sound out, but so far, that's not working. After my initial disappointment, I planned to send the unit back. Instead, I'm keeping it and upping the rating to four stars. If a future firmware update activates the audio out, I'll bump this little baby to five stars. ******************* Original Review ******************* I was really excited about getting this little unit. I watched several reviews, but they were mostly just unboxing, plug it in and look, "it works!" They really didn't talk much about how well it works. Setup on this unit is super simple. It is a very well designed process. Plug it into the monitor and the unit displays an IP address. Bring up that address in your browser, and link the unit to the desired NDI signal. Almost instantly, the display comes up. As long as you are only displaying still images, this works fine. However, if you are streaming video, the image is plagued with stuttering, dropped frames, ghost images, and blurring. I changed frame rates, resolutions, and about everything else I could think of to get a good picture, but no dice. Just to be sure the NDI signal wasn't the problem, I captured it in OBS on another computer and it handled it just fine. I'll be returning the product and waiting a little longer for an affordable NDI-HDMI converter to reach the market.

They work great, we have several in our church to broadcast the sermon to various other rooms.

For those complaining about the audio and video lag, it's more than likely due to their network structure, NOT the BirdDog device. Your network switch must be able to handle AV or else it will not work smoothly. BirdDog even recommends using the Netgear AV 4250. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these units. They work beautifully!