A big THANK YOU goes out to everyone who went and downloaded the first version of our NDI source browser tool. Based on your feedback, we’ve added a few new features since the original release.
New: Frames received per second
During testing, we discovered that NDI sources do not have to submit a new frame at the specified video frame rate. In fact, applications such as NDI’s Test Pattern app submit one new frame every second. We do the same with our Still Image Source Utility.
You will see a new indicator called Average Frames Received/Sec. This will show the number of frames received in the last second.
New: Connected to source & first frame received indicator
Another issue we discovered and was pointed out by users was it would be nice to know when we have connected to an NDI source and when we have received the first video frame. We have added both indicators to the app.
New: Frame report CSV
To help troubleshoot connectivity issues with NDI sources, we added a way to log the timestamps of each frame as received by the NDI Source Browser.
Each NDI frame is stamped with a timestamp, which is measured in nanoseconds. By default, it uses Unix timestamps, which counts the time since January 1, 1970 UTC. When a frame is received by the NDI Source Browser, we capture the Unix timestamp of the local computer. These values are both logged, both raw and converted to milliseconds.
In our testing, we found that some devices do not do time synchronization properly. In fact, one of our NDI devices does not set the local time at all - the timestamp starts at January 1, 1970, and increments based on how long the camera has been on!
Here’s a description of each column in the export.
| Column Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Time | The local computer’s date and time in UTC when this frame was received. |
| RecvTimeUnixMs | The Unix timestamp, in milliseconds, when this frame was received. |
| TimestampMs | The NDI frame’s Unix timestamp in milliseconds |
| TimestampRaw | The NDI frame’s Unix timestamp in nanoseconds (direct from the frame itself) |
| DeltaRecvTimeTimestampMs | The difference between the NDI frame’s timestamp and the local computer’s time |
| DeltaTimestampMs | The difference between the current NDI frame’s timestamp and the previous frame |
| DeltaRecvTime | The difference between the current NDI frame’s received time and the last NDI frame’s received time (i.e. Current RecvTimeUnixMs - Previous RecvTimeUnixMs) |
The report will be saved to My Documents.
Download the NDI Source Browser
For more information on NDI, visit www.NDI.tv. NDI® is a registered trademark of NewTek, Inc.