How to configure NDI and NDI Discovery Services

Owned by Ramya Raman (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 24, 2023
3 min read

Network Device Interface (NDI) is a combination of delivery/transport protocol and encoding. It is used to move uncompressed content that does compression/decompression internally. The source detection is based on mDns which is an essential requirement for NDI to work as expected.

Please note that NDI is available from version 5.6.0 onwards and is supported only with firmware 1.1.8 onwards (for AWS instances - firmware 2.0.0 onwards). 

** From version 6.2 onwards, NDI library 5.5.4 is supported.

 

TAG’s NDI URL structure is ndi://Public@system/channel

NDI consists of Recieve (Rx) and Sender (Tx) configurations.

Tx Configuration:

For Tx configuration follow the below steps.

  1. Navigate to Outputs → Configuration. Click on edit an existing encoder or add a new encoder. In the encoder settings make sure the Linear Codec Type is 2110-20.

     

    and in the Auxillary Streams, make sure NDI Publish Point is enabled and Network can be on Auto or Specify the relevant Nic.

     

2. In the NDI Publish Point section, input the Url, Network, and check the Enabled checkbox to enable NDI Tx configuration.

Grouping is a parameter that is used in NDI and by default it is “Public“.

* Please use the following NDI Url naming conventions that are supported.

  • empty field - Uses the system name and encoder name as the NDI Url - and “Public” as the Group.

  • ndi://local - Uses the system name and encoder name as the NDI Url - and “Public” as the Group.

  • ndi://testing - Uses “testing” as the system Url and encoder name as the NDI Url - and “Public” as the Group.

  • ndi://testing/demo - Uses “testing” as system name, “demo” as channel name - and “Public” as the Group.

  • ndi://ggg@testing/demo - Uses “testing” as system name, “demo” as channel name - and “ggg” as the Group.

* Network configuration can be set Auto, not limiting to one network.

3. Encoder Configuration is the same as the settings of uncompressed. Please refer to Encoder Configuration for more details.


To verify if NDI is active, navigate to Output → Status.

 

Rx Configuration:

  1. Scanning:

For a detailed description of scanning NDI sources please refer to Scan NDI.

**The basic scanning URL is “ndi://” - this will detect all the NDI sources that are available to be received from the sender. You can also use “ndi://{{ip_address}}/” or “ndi://{{device_name}}/”

2. Navigate to Sources → Configuration and search for the NDI source.

3. Double click or edit the NDI source configuration.

The configuration is the same as TX, except for one additional option - instead of the system name, the user can configure the IP of the remote machine. For example ndi://192.168.0.1/camera1

 

NDI Discovery Services

When more sources need to be added and scanned for automatic detection, NDI Discovery services is used.

From 5.7.5 version onwards, NDI Discovery services can be configured from the MCM9000. Navigate to System → System Information → System Settings

Note: If more than one NDI Discovery Server is added, the IPs should be separated by commas without any spaces between commas and IPs. For example, 10.1.2.3,10.1.2.4

Please refer to NDI Discovery Services through NDI tools for NDI tool.