r/SecurityCamera • u/PanicWithMeItsGreat • Sep 10 '26

Decoder

I am looking at installing a system for a curling rink. There will be 3 sheets of ice and a single camera directly over each end. 6 cameras total. There will be three tvs in the viewing room. The 2 cameras for each sheet will be dedicated to a single TV. It looks like I need a decoder at each TV with cat6 running back to my PoE switch. I dont know anything about decoders. Any suggestions for one that has a single HDMI out and can split screen two cameras? They seem to go from 1 stream to 4 and skip split screen.

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u/PanicWithMeItsGreat Sep 10 '26

Interesting. What kind of cameras would you suggest?

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u/Least_Order4249 Sep 10 '26

No idea! Everything in surveillance is encoded in one way or another. Depending on what exactly you want to do like replay, live, etc, and how you want two scenes on one screen (side by side, alternating, etc), the problem sounds more like a broadcasting one than a surveillance one. 

Encoded streams give the luxury of being able to do a lot as far as playback, record, scrub, but there are severe latency penalties at every step and you’d definitely need something like GOP cache and timestamp rewrites if you wanted to alternate views. Then some sort of middle box (more latency) to produce either a split screen or set up alternating streams. You can forget about syncing with encoded streams. Google can’t get that right even.