Video about Skreens by LinusTechTips
What is Skreens?
Skreens is actually the name of the company that made this device (which ATM has no name) that basically takes multiple HDMI in’s (say multiple cameras) and flows those into one HDMI out (that would go straight to a computer) for easier workflow.
Why would anyone want this?
What this does is basically take (in my example) multiple cameras that use HDMI ports to stream to a computer and is first routed to this device, and then is put all into one port saving space and money for extra ports on a computer. This also has an android/IOS app (with support soon for OBS and XSplit, and they claim to have more down the road) which controls how the stream is set up. (so having three different views of the field on the screen at once) Im hoping you can do this within a stream too, but as im not at PAX i can not be sure.
What is this good for?
This can be used to increase the amount of cameras on the field at once without the extra hassle of keeping the cords aligned to many ports on one computer. Also this could be used for some cool multi-views of the field. This also can be daisy chained, which is somewhat explained in the video, but i do not know much about the latency so i can not really explain that.
Are there any issues with this?
From what the product is supposed to do, no. At a robotics standpoint this does not solve all of the problems of a bad stream. The main issue of most streams is poor camera quality, which stems from a poor streaming budget, which is understandable. What this should help is having extra room for better quality cameras even if the computer or streaming device does not easily handle multiple HDMI inputs, as this combines them all into one.
Another issue i see is the only real control is through the Android/IOS app, but API’s for streaming devices should be available soonish (maybe it will convince the PNW to get away from ustream?)
While the video explains this better, i thought i would be a good idea to show that this exists, and this may help with streaming issues some events have. As i don’t run these streams, i will never know for sure, but this looked promising enough to still at least show you guys. Thoughts?