Network Device Interface

Network Device Interface (NDI) is a software specification developed by NewTek. It enables high-definition video to be transmitted, received, and communicated over a computer network with low latency and high quality. This royalty-free specification supports frame-accurate switching, making it suitable for live video production environments. NDI is designed to run over gigabit Ethernet with the NDI codec. It delivers 1080i high-definition video at variable data rates typically around 100 Mbit/s. By default, NDI uses multicast DNS to advertise sources on a local area network, such that NDI receivers can automatically discover and offer those sources. It also supports two other discovery modes (NDI Access, NDI Discovery Server) that allow for operations across subnets and without multicast DNS. Sources are created using an arbitrarily selected TCP port from a range of ports on the NDI senders. When a source is requested, a TCP connection is established on the appropriate port with the NDI receiver connecting to the NDI sender. NDI 3.x has options to use UDP multicast or unicast with forward error correction (FEC) instead of TCP, and can load balance streams across multiple network interface controllers (NICs) without using link aggregation.