VideoLAN Now Developing "libndi" For NDI Video Stream Handling

If the VideoLAN project wasn't already busy enough developing the VLC media player, dav1d AV1 decoder, libbluray, x264 and numerous other open-source multimedia projects, libndi is a new library being developed for dealing with NDI (Network Device Interface) video streams.

NDI is a royalty-free but proprietary standard for high quality video delivery in a low-latency manner. The official NDI SDK is offered for multiple platforms including Linux but is closed-source. NDI is already very widely used as an IP video standard while VideoLAN's libndi library aims to offer a free software solution for decoding NDI video streams.

Libndi is cross-platform and aims to provide a means of interacting with NDI video streams without relying upon any closed-source components. Libndi is released under the LGPL license and was developed in part via reverse engineering. Still to be tackled are the NDI HX specification and UDP variant as well as support for sending video streams and other improvements.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf announced the first alpha release of libndi today. The code is hosted at VideoLAN.org.