What is NDI? Everything you need to know
By Adam Noyes
NDI is a powerful video transport protocol that can be leveraged to truly elevate the quality and level of your live broadcast. With NDI 5, there’s also a ton of new features, that will now allow for remote production as well.
Recently, techtelegraph.co.uk posted a great article explaining to beginners what NDI is and some of the advantages it promises. Check out some highlights from that article, below.
NDI is a network protocol that enables audio, video, and metadata signals to be sent over standard networks in real-time. NDI is bidirectional, low latency, and can transmit video up to 4K and beyond. It is used in some of the largest broadcast environments in the world and many pro AV integrations. It is also used by individual users for video presentations or game streaming on single PC setups.
The second thing to know is that NDI is free to use. While some solutions – such as hardware with NDI built-in or specific software and applications – may come at a cost, the ability to access NDI is absolutely free. You can access NDI and its features immediately using tools you may already own.
The third key item is that NDI is more than just a transport. It allows for control of devices like PTZ cameras, capturing video feeds directly from the network to use in editing, and defines a standard for encoding and decoding. NDI is friendly to software applications, delivering high quality video. While all NDI is compressed, there is also a high efficiency option called NDI|HX that includes an easy way for devices to find each other on a network.
About the author
Michael Namatinia is President & GM of NDI at the Vizrt Group
The history of NDI
NDI began life as a way to bring broadcast quality video to more creatives. During the creation of NDI, the broadcast industry was still largely reliant on SDI cabling to transport audio and video signals. SDI has been reliable for high-cost productions but difficult to manage at scale, cumbersome to reroute or transport, and limited by only being able to carry one signal in one direction, one at a time.
The idea behind NDI was to move video signals onto existing networks – and make it free to do so. NDI can operate on standard Ethernet. Even a 1 Gigabit connection allows multiple NDI streams to pass from sender to receiver. This enables more streamlined and elegant workflows in the broadcast and digital video worlds. NDI helps lower the cost of broadcast and video creation, and further democratizes access to high-end production capabilities.
These capabilities also spread to the pro installation space. Countless houses of worship, schools, live sporting and music venues, and enterprises have added NDI feeds to their workflows to improve communication. The free-to-access model allowed NDI to quickly move into the consumer space as well. A third-party developer created a free OBS plug-in that quickly became one of the most downloaded add-ons for the software. Free tools for Adobe software and VLC were created. Video meeting platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams became NDI-capable.
Hardware was also developed. Manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, and Canon now offer NDI-enabled PTZ cameras. NVIDIA has enabled NDI capabilities that remove the need for traditional capture cards in videogame streaming.