Dante AV

What it is

Dante AV is the video extension of Audinate's Dante audio transport. Dante audio has been the dominant standard for networked pro audio since the late 2000s — available on most major mixing consoles, many studio I/O interfaces and most live-sound rigs. Dante AV adds video onto the same network fabric, encoded — depending on the edition — with the visually lossless Colibri codec (Dante AV Ultra, FPGA-based), on ASPEED AST1530/1535 chips (Dante AV-A) or with H.264 / H.265 (Dante AV-H), with the Dante-style discovery and routing applied to the video flows.

What Dante AV brings that others don't

• Audio is first-class, not an afterthought. Most AV-over-IP standards treat audio as a side payload on the video transport. Dante AV inherits the full Dante audio routing layer — separate flow management for audio channels, sample-accurate sync, the existing Dante Controller software for patch and routing.
• Coexistence with installed Dante audio. The same physical network and the same management workflow as the audio side. For facilities already on Dante, this lowers integration friction substantially.
• Pre-existing operator mental model. The AV staff already knows Dante's tooling and terminology — the video pieces install into the same model with no parallel training track.

Where Dante AV doesn't fit

• Broadcast facilities with ST 2110. SMPTE ST 2110 is the broadcast default; Dante bridges to it only at the audio layer — through AES67 mode and, since 2019, ST 2110-30 flows via Dante Domain Manager (configurable directly in Dante Controller since late 2025) — while Dante AV video has no ST 2110-20 interoperability. For video, picking one means not picking the other.
• Open-standard tender language. Dante is a commercial protocol owned by Audinate and licensed to every endpoint manufacturer, whether as chips, modules or software. Tenders specifying "open standards only" rule it out the same way they rule out SDVoE.
• Massive scale-out. Dante's network model is excellent on a tuned switch fabric; very large estates additionally need Dante Domain Manager or Dante Director for central management.

Practical positioning

Dante AV wins in higher-education AV, houses of worship, mid-size corporate AV — anywhere the audio side was already specified as Dante and adding video onto the same fabric saves a parallel network. It loses in broadcast (ST 2110), in mission-critical control rooms with open-standard tenders (IPMX), and in environments where the lowest possible latency matters more than the audio integration story (SDVoE).

Related terms

• AV over IP
• NDI (Network Device Interface)
• SMPTE ST 2110
• SDVoE