Send and receive video over UDP

[OregonGumby]

I am writing a test for radios that send and receive video.  The video is passed into the transmitting radio over Ethernet with UDP protocol and then read from the receiver with UDP.  I need to send video from a file (video test pattern) over UDP, then receive the video over UDP from the receiver on a different (multicast) address and then compare the sent and received video to verify the transmission.

My first question is how do I send and receive video over UPD?

The second question is how do I compare the sent and received video?

[Mark_Yedinak]

I would look at UDP examples that ship with LabVIEW. In terms of the actual method of sending the data the answer is, it depends. UDP is simply the transport protocol. There more than likely is an application layer protocol for sending/receiving the video. You need to know what that is before we can give any suggestions for how to do that. The protocol should be defined somewhere. That has nothing to do with LabVIEW itself and it could be a standard protocol or a proprietary one.

In terms of comparing them I would probably use a CRC to do that. Calculate the CRC32 for the data as you send the video and then calculate it again when you receive it. If the CRCs match, the data is the same. There is a chance that two differents sets of data can generate the same CRC32. You could use a MD5 hash, which LabVIEW has a native VI for that, which pretty much guarantees unique hash values for each set of data.

[OregonGumby]

Thanks Mark.  I hadn't thought of using CRC - I think that would work.  As far as the video protocol - it seems like it doesn't really matter as long as the input matches the output it's just data.  Garbage in garbage out.

[Mark_Yedinak · Accepted solution]

Then all you need to do is send large amounts of data. It doesn't even need to be video if you are simply comparing what goes in comes out. You could randomly generate your data stream on the fly.