3G SDI Native NDI|HX3 Video Streaming Encoder Decoder, ZowieBox, UVC to SDI Converter, SDI Video Capture Extender with Loopout, SRT/RTMP(S)/RTSP to NDI, Standalone H.265/H.264 Live Stream with PoE

This product was basically my first step into the complicated world of NDI, and I'm happy overall. This thing is a Swiss Army knife - it does just about everything, but not perfectly. BUT having a great quality 1080p real-time livestream of our camera feed, as long as you have a network connection to one of our campus network switches (which in turn powers the device with POE), is a game changer. Has no trouble displaying on 4K TVs and audio passthrough via HDMI works great. Makes for a super clean setup.Two gripes. This device has issues with frame rate conversions which might be solved in a future firmware update. For example, we run everything at 59.94 which the zowiebox detects as 60.00 (or at least that's the highest fps option in video settings, and no 59.94 option). Within a couple minutes there is a SEVERE delay to the audio channel. This effect appears to be caused by the Zowiebox "speeding up" the video channel to convert it from 59.94 to 60, but does not speed up the audio channel simultaneously, so for every second the audio gets behind the video channel by 0.06 seconds. So after 16.66 seconds the audio becomes 1 whole second behind the video, and after a minute it's approximately 3 seconds behind. The two options to solve this are to convert our video infrastructure to 60 (headache) instead of 59.94 which removes the conversion the Zowiebox is performing, or force the Zowiebox in video settings to 30fps. Somehow this fixed the audio issues and now everything is real-time.I've also had issues getting Multicast NDI to work properly which might be user error, but I've tinkered with this for many many hours. I have dreams of using our SDI-Zowiebox as our "transmitter" with a small army of HDMI-Zowieboxes as receivers for hallway TVs, classrooms and overflow rooms, and I'll need multicast with this. I'll have to tinker with this some more.Overall highly recommend. As I said, Swiss army pieces of hardware.

I don’t normally make post about a product. BUT, these systems are fantastic. I install AV for churches around the Indianapolis area. I have above 45 systems in operation here that I installed and manage. These will be my main go-to in the future.

Update 2-5-2025: I have raised this from 2 stars to 4 stars because of the excelent tech support effort from the seller. I still can't use this product at this time but I believe that the company will continue to work on resolving the issue, I just needed to purchase a different product for an immediate need. I have received a refund and a promise that they will continue to improve the product and contact me in the future to try this again. Below are my previous reviews.First review Jan 14, 2025: I have been testing this every day and several hours per day trying to get it to work correctly. While it does do a live stream to YouTube, with time the audio gets ahead of the video. Noticeable after perhaps 15 minutes, impossible to ignore after an hour. After several hours of live streaming it can be several seconds out of sync. You hear the entire sentence, wait a few more seconds, then see the person start to talk in the video. Support has sent the issue to their engineers who have provided firmware updates every few days and with each one there is slight improvement but still not good enough for my needs. Time is running out and I will have to return it to Amazon as defective. I see other reviews mention this video and audio out of sync problem so I think that it is a firmware problem and not just one bad box. I will search for a different company to buy a similar type product from.Update 1-31-2025: Previous review was on Jan 14, 2025, this update on Jan 31, 2025. I have been working with their tec support and they have provided several different firmware updates and several settings changes. While the sync issue has been improved some, it is still excessive for my intended use. I think that if they continue to make progress they will get it fixed, but time has run out for me and I purchased a different product that does not drift further out of A/V sync with time that I will be using for my live events. The seller offered a refund. I may try it again in a few months as I expect they will resolve the problem since they have engineers working on the firmware now. Other features of this product are very nice, like the display, connections, claimed capabilities, footprint, mounting, etc. But at this time the sync issue with YouTube prevents me from using it for my immediate needs. I also note that the sync isue only seems to effect the YouTube RTMP push function (the very thing that I need working). It does not effect RTSP and I am not trying to use NDI.

Have both this and a BirdDog. I prefer this one, web portal leaves something to be desired but so does competitor. Had this as part of exploration into esports streaming and had this as a desktop screen grabber, eventually went another direction but going to keep this as an option. Liked that the unit name, and IP would show on the LCD. Wound up just disabling the tally light.

It says it has uvc in, but it doesn’t

This vendor is finally filling a space in the current market that has been empty for too long. The ZowieBox does what the Magewell's have been doing with respect to converting HDMI to NDI (and vice versa AMAZINGLY) but they don't support all formats of NDI. This is a brilliant one-trick-pony. It supports HX1, HX2 and HX3 but not the uncompressed SHQ. This is a huge problem when using the Zowiebox in a Tricaster environment (native NDI anyone???) as the multiviews are sent out uncompressed.It's like releasing a guitar that only has 3 strings and expecting folks to be happy with the luthier.Now, I've purchased and deployed about a dozen of these since they came out using a few hacks, but have been forced to *upgrade* to Magewells due to this major shortfall. I have reached out to support to 2 months with no response. Excited if they can Fix this beautiful product.