Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

NDI, OBS and NDI Phone Apps

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000·video·17m 4s·analyzed·Feb 15, 2020
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.018

TL;DR

NDI phone camera setup guide for OBS streaming: Android free, iPhone $20, requires gigabit network.

Summary

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 provides a technical tutorial on using NDI (Network Device Interface) to connect mobile phones as remote cameras to OBS streaming software. The video covers NDI technology basics, installation of the OBS NDI plugin, free Android and paid iPhone NDI apps, and practical demonstration of both platforms with latency and quality settings. The content emphasizes network requirements (gigabit Ethernet preferred) and offers setup recommendations for pinball streaming applications.

Key Claims

  • NDI requires gigabit network per NewTek specification, though Wi-Fi is possible with limitations

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 explaining technical requirements

  • Gigabit network can safely support approximately 5-6 NDI sources before saturation; NewTek spec claims up to 10

    high confidence · Technical specification discussion

  • OBS NDI plugin version 4.7.1 requires OBS 22 or above and utilizes NDI 4 runtimes

    high confidence · Installation instructions discussion

  • Free Android NDI app (version 1.1) is available via APK download; iPhone official NDI app costs $20

    high confidence · App availability comparison

  • Normal latency mode introduces approximately 1-2 seconds delay; experimental mode reduces to 0.5-1 second

    medium confidence · Latency mode settings explanation

  • iPhone NDI app with NDI 4.0 support delivers significantly larger/higher quality video feeds than Android version

    medium confidence · Live demonstration comparison between Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone

  • DJI Osmo Mobile 3 gimbal costs approximately $120 and is recommended for smooth camera movement during streaming

    high confidence · Equipment recommendation

Notable Quotes

  • “Ethernet has a ton of bandwidth and is super capable of production environments carrying, instead of running audio cables and HDMI cables and SDI cables, you can run one Ethernet and you're good.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 1:45 — Explains core technical advantage of NDI for live production setups

  • “NewTek spec requires a gigabit network. Okay, let that sink in. So this is not something that's going to be easy to do over Wi-Fi, although it can be done over Wi-Fi.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 2:09 — Critical caveat about network requirements that affects practical implementation

  • “OBS is like a poor man's TriCaster, I want to say.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 1:26 — Positions OBS within broader professional streaming ecosystem

  • “If you don't hit this little button here...it turns red. It's not broadcasting, which means you won't see a signal.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 10:11 — Critical operational detail for Android NDI app usage

  • “Ethernet is the way it was meant to be done. If you try and do Wi-Fi, you can get away with it a little bit...but it's going to be tricky.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 16:35 — Final technical recommendation with caveat

Entities

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000personNewTekcompanyOBS (Open Broadcaster Software)productNDI (Network Device Interface)productTriCasterproductDJI Osmo Mobile 3productPalakispersonFree Go Watchevent

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Content creator producing educational technical tutorial for pinball streaming community, demonstrating practical implementation of professional streaming tools

    high · Entire video structure as educational tutorial for NDI/OBS setup; prior application at Free Go Watch event

  • ?

    technology_signal: Adoption and integration of professional-grade NDI streaming technology into hobbyist/prosumer OBS workflows for remote camera applications in pinball content

    medium · Tutorial focused on making enterprise streaming technology accessible to OBS users; emphasis on cost-effective phone-based camera solutions

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.051

0:00
Hello my friends, MPT3K here with a video about how to use your phone, your mobile phone, whether it be an Android phone or an iPhone, which I have here, as a remote camera for your OBS installation. I've done this before at Free Go Watch, where I've taken a remote camera, remote phone on an Osmo gimbal and walked around a little bit. It works pretty well. So I'm going to show you how to do it. It should be really quick. It's super easy. It's just another source. But quickly, I want to mention something about the technology we're using. And I'm going to read it because I don't have it installed in my brain. Network Device Interface, or NDI, is a royalty-free software standard developed by NewTek. NewTek is a company you should know about if you're using OBS. It'd be great to look at NewTek because these guys pioneered all the streaming stuff. anyway that it's developed by new tech to enable video compatible products to communicate deliver and receive broadcast quality video in high quality low latency manner uh it's frame accurate and suitable for switching in a live production environment basically that means that they developed a protocol that allows video and audio over ethernet okay so they built a system called the tricaster that a long time ago was called video toaster but now it's the tricaster and It's used from production studios. I've owned a TriCaster before, and I've used it. It's amazing. So when I moved over to OBS, it's like OBS is like a poor man's TriCaster, I want to say. One of the technologies they developed called NDI, which allows you to plug an Ethernet into your TriCaster and then pick up audio and video, uncompressed audio and video, HDMI quality. Now they can do up to 4K over Ethernet. Ethernet has a ton of bandwidth and is super capable of production environments carrying, instead of running audio cables and HDMI cables and SDI cables, you can run one Ether and you're good. Now, the caveat about us using NDI as OBS users is that it requires, NewTek spec requires a gigabit network.
2:09
Okay, let that sink in. So this is not something that's going to be easy to do over Wi-Fi, although it can be done over Wi-Fi. And I've seen a lot of people do it and I've done it successfully, but there will be limitations. OK, so it really wants a plugged in Cat5e gigabit network to work. Now, gigabit network will allow you to have up to 10, they say up to 10 NDI sources.
2:35
Realistically, it's like five or six good NDI sources before you saturate your network. OK, but even still, that's like five free cameras that are just plugged in. NDI also, once you have this NDI plug in in OBS, you'll be able to use any NDI source, not just your phone. So it's basically a client server kind of thing. Right. Not client server.
2:57
Oh, I don't want to get into that because that might not be correct. But anyway, they're basically once you install an NDI plug in into OBS, you can fire up an NDI external and it'll recognize it over your network. Got that? Okay, so we're going to do it with, whenever I've done it, I've had the main system, the main OBS system on Ethernet, not on the same Wi-Fi as the phone or whatever. okay um you can try this over 5g it may or may not work it really depends on your network but the way i've always had it was obs is on a system that's plugged into the ethernet and then the phone uses the wi-fi that's shared off of the same router okay cool now with that said let's install it so the first thing you want to do is you want to grab the in the uh the obs ndi as of this recording it's 4.7.1 and i'll leave a link in the description of this page but if you go to uh what's his name palakis on github and i'm sending you to github because that's where it's mostly maintained and you find this you can find it for you have to have obs version 22 or above because this utilizes ndi 4 which is i think the latest is 4 but this utilizes the NDI 4 runtimes which have greater capacity greater bandwidth they support 4K We're not going to be doing 4K, trust me. We're going to be doing 1080. Install instructions are right here on the GitHub, very easy. And if you get the installer package for Windows, it will install the plugin into OBS and the NDI runtimes that are needed. It will do them both. Otherwise, you have to install the plug-in and the runtimes yourself. Just get the installer package. For a Mac, same deal. If you get the, where's the Mac package? I don't know, whatever. You just download the, oh, the PKG file. I'm on a Mac right now, but it doesn't matter. NDI is platform agnostic. And if you can hear my son in the background, that's awesome. But I got to do this video. All right. Once you've installed it, you go to, I'm going to remove it right now. If you go to your OBS, once you've installed it, you run OBS. Then when you hit your plus for a new source, you'll see NDI source is a new source that you can set. So we're going to choose NDI source, and then you can name it whatever you want. I'm going to just keep it named NDI source, hit OK. And it's basic 101 source adding to OBS. But now we have source name. Now notice I don't have anything in here, and it's not allowing me to pick anything. That's because I don't have any other NDI sources running on my network, on my local network. There's nothing running. It's not recognizing anybody out there. So if you haven't run the app on your phone, it's going to show blank because there's nothing out there. But I do want to show you this. Bandwidth usage, you can set it to highest, lowest, or audio only, which is nice. Lowest means it's going to try and use the minimal amount of bandwidth on your network, so it will result in a lower quality file, but you'll still get an image. Sync, I don't mess with. Hardware acceleration and fixed alpha blending and all the stuff you can play with on your own. The only other thing I want to mention is the latency mode. There's normal, which they're saying is safe, which means it's about a second, about two seconds of lag between the camera and you know and getting back here if you choose low experimental it's about a half a second or a second of lag depending i've chosen uh low all the time it says experimental but it works just fine okay so we don't have any sources yet but i'm just gonna hit okay because you can keep the source in there you can choose different sources Whenever you launch this here, it will search for new sources. OK, so if you don't get anything the first time, hit cancel or hit OK. Go to your phone and launch phones. OK, so I have two different phones here. I have an old iPhone 6S and I have an old Galaxy Note 5, both of which work fine with this. Do you have phones more powerful than these? Way to go. Awesome. But you don't need phones more powerful than these, I don't think. Now, once again, I'm on a gigabit network. Okay. So you for Android users, there are various apps that do support NDI. But there is one free app by NewTek themselves. And this is it. This is NDI 1.1 APK. and I'll leave a link in the description below once again to where you can download this. This is totally free. You need to know how to install an APK on your phone though because you're not going to find this in the Play Store. This is totally free. It's 1.1 but I found that it's sufficient enough to do everything I need to do in OBS. So it gives me a nice HD screen. I say HD because I'm not sure if it's HD but it looks really good. The audio and everything and it works just fine and it's totally free. Otherwise search on the Play Store and see if there are any other NDI capable apps. I don't know if NewTek actually came out with an Android version of an NDI app for, yeah, for NDI. I do know this one is free and totally cool. And so if you an iPhone user and you can get your hands on a cheap Android phone maybe do that because that way you get this whole thing for free If you an Apple user if you an iPhone user you in luck but you also not in luck Once again search the Apple Store for NDI compatible phone apps
8:45
NewTek's official app is $20, but it supports NDI 4.0, and I'm sure you'll get upgrades. And once they go to 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, whatever, it has a few more features. But at the end of the day, it kind of basically does the same thing the Android one does. OK, you do have different modes. So the iPhone, I'll show you in a minute. The iPhone allows you to render in different modes. You might be able to get some more, you know, you might get better results with the iPhone version. but this is the only official apple iphone um app for ndi if you know of any new ones if you know there are a lot of apps on the play store and the and the apple store that say they support ndi i tried a couple of them and it didn't recognize them at all so your mileage may vary but these two work all right so here we are at the final stage i'm going to first show you with my galaxy note five with the free app I'm gonna turn my app my phone on and I have the new tech app you know installed that's my cool phone and I'm gonna activate it which brings me to this screen here see and it's just it's just showing me right you can switch which camera it is the important thing about the free app is if you don't hit this little button here let's see if I can hit it hit it there we go. If you don't hit the little record button, it turns red. It's not broadcasting, which means you won't see a signal. You will see the phone show up in NDI source. So if I double click this now and go to source name, there it is. Localhost, Samsung, SM, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now remember, this is on Wi-Fi right now, which is the same network that my OBS installation is on, which is on in a router on ether. Okay. So this is not competing with anything else on the wifi. That's very important. If I tried to fire both of these up, they're both going to compete over wifi and one of them is going to be choppy. So for this, for this reason, you probably only need one, but you can, I would say you can only safely get away with one, depending on your network. You're only going to get with one, with one camera. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to come down to latency mode. I'm gonna put it on, I'll show you the difference. Normal is, boom, so this is normal. So you can see the delay, move, move, yep. It's not bad. And if this is a remote camera where that one second or half a second delay doesn't matter, then you're in like Flynn. It's bringing audio over too, as you can see, it's really blasting it. You can see NDI Source is bringing over audio, So it's good. It's pretty good audio. All right. And now at this point, I can option to hit the there's a little button on here that allows me to change the camera to front facing. Right. So now it's now it's on me. And I noticed every time you mess around with settings after you've launched the camera, the delay becomes longer. So you might want to get your settings right first and then start messing around with things. But I could also change the quality. So that's like the maximum quality. All right. And I'm leaving it in native. Of course, you can stretch that screen. You can make it as big as you want.
12:14
And if I go to NDI source again and choose latency mode low, hit OK, it kicks into low latency mode. So that's kind of really super, super quick. Notice the rolling shutter. You don't want to do rolling shutter. is that tearing, that kind of screen weirdness that's happening. These phones don't typically have really good, really high shutter speeds. Well, at least this one doesn't. So that the Android version I going to hit stop I lose my signal I going to shut this down All right I going to close it out on the Android version I gonna hit stop I lose my signal I gonna shut this down all right I gonna close it out on the Android so it not competing with the iPhone all right so let's turn the iPhone on five of us my password I almost told you my password and let's launch the NDI where is it it's like NDI whatever that that guy right there the $20 app so this $20 app on the app iPhone once again it has a little button down there if this NDI is not engaged if it's white it's not broadcasting if it's blue it's broadcasting what's nice is it defaults to broadcasting once again you also have a lot of options on the bottom of the screen sorry about this so you have options for exposure and all this other neat stuff same deal I'm going to go back now since I'm since I'm running it it should show up it does Manu's iPhone and the IX blah blah blah we're gonna just go right to low okay it's already there I'm gonna hit OK and there we go now look at how huge it is so this so this is representative of NDI 4.0 they can get away with much larger screen sizes this is ridiculous right so I would probably I would do one of two things I would shrink it down right I can say let's see transform fit the screen so it fits the screen or a better option for you guys would be to there's a little cogwheel on there feel free to play with these because you you guys are all smart but there's a little cogwheel lets me change the resolution three times. So this is maximum. This is kind of native. So this is now a smaller resolution. It fits to my screen. And then there's one more smaller resolution below that. And that's a four by three. And you could probably gain, depending on the quality you need, right? This has less low rolling shutter, actually. So this phone may be a little better. But depending on the quality you need, you can down res on the Apple version to meet the quality you want you can turn on your uh you know you can turn on your your flash you can set up your your uh lower thirds i mean not your uh your uh your grid so you can get your thirds in there's a lot of neat things you can do you can turn on and off the the microphone you can zoom in and out okay so that's basically it you've got all the things you need to do to get this to work um the only other thing i'm gonna just get rid of that the only other thing i'm gonna say is if you are using a phone maybe you should if you're going to use it a lot get yourself a gimbal get yourself a nice small motorized gimbal i did a review of the dji osmo mobile 3 which is a terrific terrific gimbal it's about 120 bucks um it's amazing i don't have it here right now but But get yourself something that's steady or or hold. Don't hold your phone in your hand. Hold hold the phone in like a selfie stick or something like that, because that tends to smooth out movements. Last thing you want to do is have a jittery mess when you're moving around and your viewers are trying to watch a jittery mess. All right. That's it for me. And NDI. NDI has a ton of more uses than just phones. There's PTZ cameras, which is pan, tilt, zoom cameras that you can control through NDI. There's a whole interface that you can do stuff with.
16:27
NDI is huge. So if you start to welcome NDI into your OBS workflow, you're going to be blown away. But the only caveat is, right, Ethernet is the way it was meant to be done. If you try and do Wi-Fi, you can get away with it a little bit. We're getting away with a little bit of a Wi-Fi, but it's going to be tricky.
16:48
And your mileage may vary. So good luck. Thanks for watching.