NDI, the Network Device Interface, is celebrating its tenth anniversary at IBC. It first emerged as an initiative of NewTek, became part of Vizrt, and is now a stand-alone open standard.
NDI Technical Director, Roberto Musso, said: “NDI is everywhere.” It is now so widely adopted that even he doesn’t know who is doing what with NDI. “Mainly because one of our strategies is to have this free SDK where software companies can use NDI without telling us.” However, one indicator is that there are 9000 downloads of its NDI tools for Mac and Windows each week.
“One of the main markets where NDI is successful is broadcast,” but it is widely used in education, “because it's free to use. There are a lot of open source projects like OBS-Studio with NDI support”, which is also widely used for gaming.
NDI is now developing beyond just video over IP, becoming a connectivity technology, allowing users to connect devices or software applications, and then exchange video, audio and metadata. It could fill a need for generic device connection. “In my dream, I would like to use NDI to manage my coffee machine. Because once I solve the connection problem, then I can do what I want with this technology.” NDI’s zero configuration “is probably one of the main reasons for the success and the diffusion of NDI, because it just works”.
Another market where NDI has succeeded, is cloud, “because it's unicast, it just works and you don't need hardware acceleration to use it”, so it reduces the cost of output, he explained.
It has just released NDI 6.3, which continues the drive to add a layer of control started in 6.2, and allows third-party apps to control interconnection between devices, building on the power of the NDI Discovery Server to identify codecs used, number of audio channels, and know, before starting the connection whether the devices are compatible. This was not something they expected to require when NDI started, “but now we have customers with thousands of ND streams on their network, so the actual discovery registration on the receiver side is starting to become an issue”.
Coming next, NDI is working to improve synchronisation, particularly for audio, as well as reducing latency (zero latency is not possible), and to change the perception that NDI is just for audio and video, “so you can potentially control any kind of device, any kind of software”.
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