Dante Certification Level 1 – Chapter 7: A Simple Demonstration

Level 1 – Chapter 07 – A Simple Demonstration

Okay. So far we’ve covered a lot of theory about audio and video, plus a brief introduction to who Audinate is and what we do. But what if you’ve never used Dante before? Don’t worry.

Let me show you how you can easily set up a Dante network. First, let’s start by breaking Dante into four functional categories ranked in order of importance. The first is discovery. Can we find a device on the network?

Next is clocking. Is the device synchronized with other devices? After that, we have subscriptions. Can the devices establish media flows with other devices?

A successful media flow is indicated by a green check mark in Dante controller. Finally, latency are the packets arriving on time. As we progress through the course, you’ll see that these four categories not only apply in Dante controller, but also in Dante director and Dante domain manager. Knowledge of these four categories is essential for troubleshooting problems when they arise.

Let’s take a closer look To Create a Dante network. Simply plug your Dante devices into a network switch and install Dante controller on your computer. Dante controller is a free software application for PC or mac. When you launch it, it will automatically scan the network for devices.

This is a process that we call discovery. Once devices have been discovered, they will start appearing in the routing tab of Dante controller. We suggest always going to the device information tab first to find out if the devices have been discovered correctly. We’ll go into more detail about that later.

Once discovered, the devices will communicate with each other. To negotiate a clock leader, the elected clock leader will synchronize the other devices, which would now be called followers. This is a process we call clocking and just like discovery, this is an automatic process, so don’t worry about how to set the clock leader for now. If you want to see this process visually navigate to the clock status tab.

As we go through the course, you will see that many of the automatic processes can also be manipulated manually. If this is the first time you’ve used Dante, you don’t have to worry about manual configuration. Okay, now all the devices have been discovered and a clock leader has been elected. That means that we can start making subscriptions to create media flows between devices.

Let’s go back to the routing tab where you can see all the transmitters across the top and the receivers are along the left side. You can click on the plus and minus buttons to expand or collapse the channel lists for devices. For now, I’ll make a subscription from my computer to my mixer. You’ll see how it highlights both devices.

If I want to create a subscription, simply click on the intersection and you’ll hear the music start playing. To unsubscribe a signal, just click on the intersection again to remove the check mark. As we look at our channel lists, you’ll see we have different channel icons. A video frame icon indicates that this is a video flow.

The headphones icon indicates mono audio channels and wire icons at the end indicate control flows such as serial infrared USB or consumer electronic control, also known as CEC. I’ve already showed you how to route audio, but what about video routing? Video sources is done exactly the same way. Just click at the intersection of the video transmitter and video receiver, and just like that, you’ve routed a video signal.

Just to be clear, when I did that, I only routed the video signal. The audio did not automatically tag along. If I want the audio to follow the video, I can click at those intersections to create subscriptions separately. The point here is that audio and video are freely routable.

You don’t have to worry about audio being embedded with video. I can take the video transmitter and send the audio and video to different receivers. This is often called an audio breakaway. For instance, here, I’ll send the audio from a video transmitter to a mixer, and if I go the other way around, I can have a Dante AV receiver accepting audio and video from different transmitters, merging them together.

Finally, the last category is latency. Right now, you don’t have to worry about latency because by default, every Dante device is set to one millisecond. During this course, you’ll learn what latency is, how to set it correctly, and when it’s recommended to modify latency values. So there you go.

In just a few minutes, we were able to show you how to plug in and use the Dante network. We don’t need specialized network switches and devices. Just work right out of the box. You launch Dante controller.

It automatically starts discovering devices, adjusting clocking, and you can create subscriptions with the click of a mouse.