WebRTC + NDI = Broadcasters Heaven?
By Adam Noyes
NDI is a key ingredient to many high quality live productions. Now, with NDI becoming more and more available with multiple plugins to multiple systems, the technology is better than ever before.
Check out some highlights from this article on Web RTC utilizing NDI to improve live broadcasts, below.
This pandemic we’ve all been living in these past few months forced many people and companies to change their daily patterns. Most of us have been forced by circumstances to stay and work from home for long periods of time. This clearly had an impact on the broadcasting industry in general. Just think, for instance, of interviews or any kind of live interaction in News or Talk Shows: without the ability to have guests (and often even hosts!) in the studios, production teams were forced to find solutions that would still allow them to do their job.
This may seem a relatively straightforward answer to us folks working in the real-time business. In practice, it’s really not that easy, and most comes from how production teams actually work with streams they need to edit and broadcast, and the tools they employ. As it often happens, I was actually enlightened by the smart people we interact with every day on Twitter. In particular, Dan Jenkins from Nimble Ape (and mastermind behind the amazing CommCon events, make sure you watch the latest Virtual edition that just ended!) made an interesting observation related to BBC News, and Sam Machin’s answer was revealing to me, as it introduced a new “player” I wasn’t aware of:
This was the first time I ever heard of NDI, and it was kind of a revelation: it reminded me how some choices are often driven by how easy they make it to keep on using your existing workflow. This sparkled my interest, and led me to contribute to the discussion, where I wondered how easy (or hard!) it could be to perform an RTP-to-NDI translation of sorts:
The mention of OBS was quite interesting as well, since our friends at CoSMo Software actually did implement a version of OBS capable of talking WebRTC. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a red herring, since as Dr. Alex clarified, OBS-WebRTC doesn’t support WebRTC input, which is what could have helped translating the incoming stream to NDI from there:
I was really curious to investigate NDI as a technology after these exchanges (especially considering I knew nothing about it), but then life and work got in the way, and I forgot about it.
A few weeks ago, though, a private chat with Dan sparkled that interest again. He mentioned how a video production company he knew was really struggling with getting proper live feeds from the Internet to be used in what they were producing every day. Once more, NDI was mentioned as pretty much a standard de facto in that line of business, and how a proper way to bring in WebRTC streams is still sorely missing, which forces editors to basically capture the source material in “hacky” ways.
As such, I decided to start looking into NDI, to figure out if the RTP-to-NDI translation I wondered about was indeed feasible or not.