GStreamer NDI Plugin for Linux

Compiled and tested with NDI SDK 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0

This is a plugin for the GStreamer multimedia framework that allows GStreamer to receive a stream from a NDI source. This plugin has been developed by Teltek and was funded by the University of the Arts London and The University of Manchester.

Currently the plugin has a source element for receiving from NDI sources, a sink element to provide an NDI source and a device provider for discovering NDI sources on the network.

Some examples of how to use these elements from the command line:

# Information about the elements
$ gst-inspect-1.0 ndi
$ gst-inspect-1.0 ndisrc
$ gst-inspect-1.0 ndisink

# Discover all NDI sources on the network
$ gst-device-monitor-1.0 -f Source/Network:application/x-ndi

# Audio/Video source pipeline
$ gst-launch-1.0 ndisrc ndi-name="GC-DEV2 (OBS)" ! ndisrcdemux name=demux   demux.video ! queue ! videoconvert ! autovideosink  demux.audio ! queue ! audioconvert ! autoaudiosink

# Audio/Video sink pipeline
$ gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc is-live=true ! video/x-raw,format=UYVY ! ndisinkcombiner name=combiner ! ndisink ndi-name="My NDI source"  audiotestsrc is-live=true ! combiner.audio

Feel free to contribute to this project. Some ways you can contribute are:

• Testing with more hardware and software and reporting bugs
• Doing pull requests.

Compilation of the NDI element

To compile the NDI element it's necessary to install Rust, the NDI SDK and the following packages for gstreamer:

$ apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
      gstreamer1.0-plugins-base

To install the required NDI library there are two options:

1. Download NDI SDK from NDI website and move the library to the correct location.
2. Use a deb package made by the community. Thanks to NDI plugin for OBS.

To install Rust, you can follow their documentation: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html

Once all requirements are met, you can build the plugin by executing the following command from the project root folder:

cargo build
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=`pwd`/target/debug
gst-inspect-1.0 ndi

By defult GStreamer 1.16 is required, to use only GStreamer 1.12 instead of 1.16, pass --disable-default-features to cargo. Only a subset of video formats is supported with this GStreamer version.

If all went ok, you should see info related to the NDI element. To make the plugin available without using GST_PLUGIN_PATH it's necessary to copy the plugin to the gstreamer plugins folder.

$ cargo build --release
$ sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 target/release/libgstndi.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/
$ sudo ldconfig
$ gst-inspect-1.0 ndi

More info about GStreamer plugins written in Rust:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-rs https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-rs

License

This plugin is licensed under the LGPL - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgments

• University of the Arts London and The University of Manchester.
• Sebastian Dröge (@sdroege).