NDI vs SMPTE ST 2110

Q: NDI vs SMPTE ST 2110: Is NDI good enough, or do I need ST 2110?

NDI: Vizrt's video-over-IP protocol carrying compressed video, audio and metadata between applications and devices on an ordinary ethernet LAN. It is how graphics machines, capture software, PTZ cameras and switchers move pictures around a venue without pulling SDI. SMPTE ST 2110: A suite of SMPTE standards for carrying uncompressed video, audio and ancillary data as separate RTP streams over a managed IP network, all locked to PTP. It is the broadcast plant replacement for an SDI router, used in OB trucks, studios and large arena control rooms.

showstack / compare / ndi-vs-smpte-st-2110

Is NDI good enough, or do I need ST 2110? Below is every field we hold on both, side by side. Each one is sourced on the individual entry, and anything nobody could source is left blank rather than guessed.

Side by side

	NDI	SMPTE ST 2110
Category	video-transport	video-transport
Flow	Media — large, continuous, on time and in order	Media — large, continuous, on time and in order
Ports	UDP 5353, TCP 5959, TCP 5960, TCP 5961
Transport	tcp, udp	udp
Multicast	yes	yes
Spec availability	proprietary-documented	published-paid
Steward	Vizrt (NDI AB), originally NewTek	SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers)
First published	2015	2017
Status	current	current
Our confidence	verified	reported

Both are media flows. Anything that starves the link — usually a management transfer nobody scheduled — and jitter that outruns the receive buffer. That applies equally to either, so it is not a discriminator here.

What each one carries

Capability defined by the specification, not by any one product. A blank means the specification does not fix it, which is itself the answer on a transport like SRT.

	NDI	SMPTE ST 2110
Sample rates	48 kHz	48 kHz
Audio bit depth	16-bit, 32-bit	16-bit, 24-bit
Audio encoding	Floating point or 16-bit PCM, carried with the video	ST 2110-30, which is AES67
Resolution	Not fixed by the specification	Not fixed by the specification
Frame rate	Not fixed by the specification	Not fixed by the specification
Colour sampling	4:2:2, 4:2:0	4:2:2, 4:4:4
Video bit depth	8-bit, 10-bit	8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit, 16-bit
Video compression	Visually lossless (NDI High Bandwidth) or H.264/H.265 (NDI HX)	None — uncompressed essence

NDI, audio: Audio and video travel together, unlike ST 2110 where they are separate essences.

NDI, video: NDI caps neither resolution nor frame rate; 3840x2160 is where most hardware decoders stop and software goes past it. The two families are very different things sharing one name: High Bandwidth is lightly compressed at 100 to 250 Mbit/s with low latency, HX is long-GOP at a fraction of that and correspondingly more delay.

SMPTE ST 2110, audio: Essence streams are separate, so audio and video are independently routable — which is the whole point of 2110 and the reason lip sync becomes something you have to manage rather than something you get.

SMPTE ST 2110, video: ST 2110-20 is resolution and frame-rate agnostic by design; what limits you is the link. Uncompressed HD is around 1.5 Gbit/s and UHD around 12 Gbit/s, so the practical ceiling is the network rather than the standard. Audio travels separately in ST 2110-30 as AES67.

Speaks both (5)

These are the safe choices if you have not committed to either, or need to bridge the two.

Smode Smode Tech
vMix StudioCoast
Analog Way Alta 4K Analog Way
Megapixel HELIOS LED Processing Platform Megapixel VR
Modulo Kinetic Modulo Pi

NDI only (35)

ArKaos MediaMaster ArKaos
CasparCG Server CasparCG project
Depence Syncronorm GmbH
grandMA3 onPC MA Lighting
HeavyM HeavyM
Hippotizer Green Hippo (an ACT Entertainment brand)
Isadora TroikaTronix (Mark Coniglio)
L8 L8 LLC
MadMapper garageCube
Millumin Anomes (Philippe Chaurand)
Mitti Imimot
Modul8 GarageCUBE
OBS Studio OBS Project
openFrameworks openFrameworks community
PIXERA AV Stumpfl
ProPresenter Renewed Vision
ProVideoPlayer (PVP) Renewed Vision
Resolume Arena Resolume
Stage Precision Stage Precision
TouchDesigner Derivative
Unity Unity Technologies
Unreal Engine Epic Games
Ventuz Ventuz Technology
WATCHOUT Dataton
7thSense Delta Media Server 7thSense
Analog Way Picturall Mark II Analog Way
Avolites Ai Q3 Avolites
Blackmagic ATEM 4 M/E Constellation HD Blackmagic Design
Christie Pandoras Box Christie
disguise vx 4 disguise
grandMA3 full-size MA Lighting
Green Hippo Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 Green Hippo
Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2 Green Hippo
NETGEAR M4250 (AV Line) NETGEAR
AV Stumpfl PIXERA one AV Stumpfl

SMPTE ST 2110 only (2)

Brompton Tessera S8 Brompton Technology
Brompton Tessera SX40 Brompton Technology

What goes wrong with NDI

Discovery is mDNS, which is link-local. NDI sources do not appear across a router. If you need cross-subnet sources you must run the NDI Discovery Server on TCP 5959 and point every device at it explicitly.

Opening only 5960 and 5961 in a firewall gets you discovery and no video. Each connection also grabs ports from the 6960 and 7960 blocks, so the rule has to cover those ranges.

NDI HX is a different thing to full NDI. It is hardware H.264 or HEVC, much lower bitrate and noticeably more latency, and it is what most cheap PTZ cameras actually send.

Full-bandwidth NDI is roughly 100 Mbit/s for 1080i per stream. A gigabit uplink shared with anything else runs out faster than people expect, and NDI degrades by dropping frames rather than by failing cleanly.

The SDK is royalty-free but proprietary, and the licence requires visible NDI attribution in your application. There is no published wire format, so every implementation goes through Vizrt's binary SDK.

What goes wrong with SMPTE ST 2110

Video, audio and ancillary data are separate streams with separate multicast addresses. Losing one leaves the others running, so "no audio" or "no timecode" can present as a perfectly healthy video path.

Everything hangs off PTP. ST 2110-10 defines the system timing model, so a grandmaster that steps, or two grandmasters fighting, takes the whole plant out at once rather than degrading gracefully.

ST 2110-20 video is genuinely uncompressed. Bandwidth is set by raster and frame rate, not by an average bitrate, so plan link capacity from the video format and leave headroom before you commit to a switch.

ST 2110-21 defines sender traffic shaping types. A sender and a receiver with mismatched shaping expectations gives intermittent picture breakup under load, not a clean failure you can point at.

ST 2110-30 audio is closely related to AES67 but the two do not automatically interoperate. Packet time and channel count profiles have to match on both ends before anything passes.

The suite is a dozen separate documents (ST 2110-10, -20, -21, -22, -30, -31, -40, -41, -43, plus RPs) and they are priced individually. Budget for the whole set, not one part number.

Sources

NDI Related Network Ports — Vizrt / NDI primary
NDI SDK Licensing — Vizrt / NDI primary
Network Device Interface (announcement date, NDI HX, NDI Bridge) — Wikipedia
ST 2110 Suite of Standards — SMPTE primary
SMPTE ST 2110 FAQ — SMPTE primary
SMPTE Publishes ST 2110 Standards for Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks — TV Tech

Disagree with any of this?

Every claim above comes from one of the two entries and carries a source. If one is wrong, correcting it is a single file and it fixes this page automatically. Edit NDI or edit SMPTE ST 2110.