This page covers sending a playout to other machines over the network. No cable, no card: the picture appears as a source on any NDI receiver on the same network — a mixer, a second machine, a monitor.
The settings
Settings → Outputs, with the kind set to NDI:
| Setting | What it is |
|---|---|
| NDI name | The name receivers see. Give it something recognisable: Hall screen, not Output 1. |
| NDI group(s) | Which groups this source belongs to, comma separated. |
Groups, and the trap in them
Receivers only see the groups they are set to look at, and that is Public by default.
So: leave Public in the list unless every receiver in the building has been set up for your own group. A source in a private group that nobody is looking for is invisible, and looks exactly like a source that is not working.
A second group is useful to tell several playouts apart on one network. Leave the field empty and it uses Public,Ultimate Playout.
What has to be installed
NDI needs the DistroAV plugin and the NDI runtime installed on the machine.
Without DistroAV, NDI is not offered under Video output at all; the tooltip question below then only appears for a playout that was already set to NDI.
If the output does not start, the status tooltip asks the obvious question: are the DistroAV plugin and the NDI runtime installed? That is nearly always the answer.
What NDI costs
Network, and quite a lot of it. A full-resolution NDI stream is a serious load on a network — one line is fine on gigabit, several on a shared office network is not.
If NDI is stuttering while the machine is calm, the network is the place to look: a switch, a shared uplink, or a wireless leg somewhere in between.
Alpha
NDI carries transparency. That makes it the simplest route for graphics a vision mixer lays over its own picture — a PNG with transparency, a scene, a web page with a transparent background — without needing a card with fill and key.