Decimator MD-HX: A Customer Review

BoxCast Team • March 21, 2019

This post is a video review of the Decimator MD-HX, one of the most versatile tools in a live streaming production set up. It's part of our series on live streaming equipment.

Today, I'm excited to show you the new Decimator MD-HX one of the best tools to keep handy for any event that you stream. I like to take one of these everywhere that I go because it's like a Swiss Army knife for handling video signals.

I primarily use it to convert SDI to HDMI and scale 1080p to 1080i but it's still really useful for all kinds of situations especially when you're working with the new team or new equipment and you don't know what kind of signals you're dealing with that being said the decimator is a scaler a frame rate converter a signal converter it makes for a great paper way it's really bright in red and it does about a million other things too as a scaler.

You can down scale the resolution of your video say from 1080p at 60 frames per second to 720p at 30 frames per second or you can upscale it and go from 720p to 1080p.

This is especially useful when using video switchers like the Blackmagic ATEM that require all of your video signals to match each other. And like I said, it's also a converter so it has HDMI inputs and outputs, along with SDI inputs and outputs so you can easily convert your HDMI signals to SDI or your SDI signals - you might or you can send an HDMI signal into the decimator and send the same signal right back out to another device. This is what's known as a loop through.

Now the decimator only retails for $295 and when you consider the fact that most devices cost that much just to convert HDMI to SDI or just as the ID HDMI you realize you're getting a pretty good bang for your buck.

As always if you have any questions about using the decimator or anything live-streaming related you can feel free to let me know in the comments below or reach me any time here thanks for watching!

Final Thoughts + Further Reading

For more ways to enhance your overall tech setup, check out the free Buyer's Guide to Live Video Streaming highlights key features to consider when evaluating your different options.