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Have you ever wanted to do a live stream while walking around your office or around town?
Well with the Teradek VidiU you can broadcast straight from your camera, no PC required.
I'm Kien Tran, and this is GeekBeat.
Now many of you guys know we do a lot of live streaming here at GeekBeat, and a lot of what
we do requires a lot of huge computers with capture systems and other complex things.
But sometimes you just want to take a feed out of your camera and send it to the internet.
Teradek has come up with a great portable solution called the VidiU.
The VidiU is a all in one unit that simply takes an HDMI signal out of your camera and
pushes it out live to the internet on whatever streaming service you want to use.
All you have to do is plug your HDMI camera into the VidiU, and press the stream button..
That's it.
Now of course you will have to configure the VidiU before you can stream. And while you
can do a lot of the configuration via the embedded LCD display, your best bet will be
to use the available iOS app.
The iOS app is very straight forward. It gives you direct access to all the different
settings of the VidiU, like platform and quality settings, and provides a preview monitor of
what the VidiU is seeing from the camera. With the app, you can get diagnostics of
the status of the VidiU, and start and stop the stream itself.
As for the device itself, the VidiU is very compact and self contained.
It has a clear to read LCD screen to see the current status of the device as well as allow
you to adjust settings via the 4 way directional menu button.
On the side you have a power switch and a head phone jack to monitor the audio going
out. It also includes a USB port to stream to a USB 3G/4G modem instead of the built
in dual band MIMO Wifi or Ethernet jack.
On the back, you have your HDMI input, a microphone input for external audio, a reset button,
your network jack, and your power jack. There are also a couple power indicators on the
back that tell you if you're charging the unit and if it's running off of DC power
The VidiU includes a removable hotshoe mount to put it on top of any camera, or to leave
it stacked on a table.
What makes the VidiU great is for those times when you need to go completely wireless, the
VidiU has an internal battery pack that lasts about an hour. Just place the unit on top
of your camera, attach a USB modem or wifi hot spot to it, and you're off and running
completely wirelessly.
The VidiU supports full 1080p resolutions and encodes the video in real time using h.264
- AAC at up to 5 megabits.
While the VidiU natively supports liveStream and Ustream, you can also stream to any RTMP
system that you want.
The VidiU's motto is "broadcast without boundaries" and that's definitely what it can deliver.
At $699, the VidiU isn't exactly a cheap device, but when you consider everything it
can do, it's a great value. You won't save much money by building your own computer to
do the same thing, and it won't be as portable as this.
I took this VidiU, one of our Vixias, and my iPhone 5 in hotspot mode, and ran around
downtown Dallas streaming for almost an hour before my phone died. The VidiU happily
streamed the whole time, dynamically adjusting the quality as needed depending on how well
the LTE network was doing. You can't easily do that with a computer running around downtown.
I've also taken the VidiU and piped a HDMI feed out of a Tricaster for 6 hours non stop
streaming at the full 5 megabit. In both cases, the VidiU was rock solid.
To me, the VidiU is a great value for streaming your content, whether it be direct from a
camera or from a production switcher itself.
Based on it's ease of use, relative affordability, and quality, I have to give it a GeekBeat
Editors Choice, and if you are looking to do your own streaming, you definitely need
to take a look at getting one of these. You can read even more detail about the VidiU
on our website at geekbeat.tv
So how would you guys use this product? Give us some comments down below. As always, if
you like this review and want to see more of it, give us a thumbs up and click that
subscribe button!
My name is Kien Tran with GeekBeat TV, and thanks for watching!