NDI HX Camera: Easy Streaming Reviews

by GrayStag

I purchased NDIHXCamera exclusively because it said that it will transmit video in 4k@60fps. Upon downloading NDI 5, it’s only recognizing video stream in 2k@30fps. On top of that, I can’t record video even in 2k@30fps without SIGNIFICANT lag. The only way to stop the lag is to switch to low bandwidth mode.

I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max, a high-end gaming laptop, and as well as a gigabit fiber optic internet connection. I know my phone is capable of recording 4k footage @ 60fps and that my laptop and internet is more than capable of handling the bandwidth. PLEASE look into this! If I’m paying for an app, I expect it to work as advertised.

by BeastBas23

I literally just bought this for Streamlabs OBS and it lags really bad. I have solid internet and I stream on a daily basis with a nice PC setup. For the price this product should offer a usb to pc connection. For just straight reliance on wifi I would not recommend buying this. Waste of $20. I want my money back. Like seriously don’t buy. It’s sounds great but the performance is horrible. I have an iPhone 11 Pro as well so the quality should be amazing. Literally like a 2 sec delay compared to my Logitech c922.

by Usdcarbon

Poor Performance for a great Idea, I’m tried it with 260 Mbps down and 29 Mbps up, NDIHXCamera has lag and stuttering to the point that it’s not usable at all, I will not recommend to use this to do any streaming too expensive and it doesn’t deliver what they offer.

You Better buy “Shoot - camera fees” cheap and reliable as the connection is made through your logging cable, I have use it for 2 iPhones as cameras as the same time and works perfect, you will gain so much screen view without being concern about performance issues, highly recommended.

by Lockergnome

99% of the time it works all the time, but that’s not why this review matters. Auto-focus doesn’t lock properly, you can’t switch between various lenses on the front or rear cameras (like, you cannot use your wide angle lenses at all), white balance is a nightmare / non-existent, you can’t lock exposure properly, and updates are very few and far between. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by Elliottcable

NDIHXCamera streams very smoothly — as usual, NDI is a fricking great protocol.

Unfortunately, *besides* the quality of the actual streaming, everything else is terrible. UI is very basic, basically no features. To be frank, that’s not a huge deal, to me; the point is the streaming, and it does that well.

The one really, really serious issue, is that I can’t control which of the three cameras (wide-angle, normal, telephoto) NDIHXCamera uses on my iPad or iPhone. As far as I can tell, you’re stuck on the normal camera, period, until they update with more options.

by Dmanglol

Technically NDIHXCamera is simple and just seems to work. Unfortunately on my 6s I can only go for about 10 minutes before it overheats. I have no case on my phone and it was mounted in a cradle arm so it had good airflow around it.

I haven’t tried on my other iPhones because I can’t risk the phone shutting down during a presentation due to overheating.

by Slon104

Hello.

Like this product :) it is good for normal people

I am using obs with 3 phones. all have NDIHXCamera.. and as I use an haswel laptop I have some problems with cpu usage and HW accelerated decode is not helping that mouth ….

just wish to have more options in video quality output… 3 quality presets is not enough for me :)

NDIHXCamera has really not great support for an notches on the phone
- is looking really hideous

it is reliable app ;)

hope NDIHXCamera gets som love from designers and developers :)))

right now just 3 stars
sorry

by Vidgraf

I love the NDI tech over cat5 but over witless is not stable enough. This is a great app for testing signal but the latency over WiFi makes the camera and audio almost useless. I wish I could also connect via Lightning cable like OBS camera it will be a huge improvement but I understand it won’t be using NDI tech at that point which makes it null.

by Ian S. (musician)

I was using this to connect my iPhone 11 to OBS on my Mac to record 1080p. I’m also planning to use this to stream. The video recording that came out was nice and smooth for the most part. However, today the video seems to be choppy. I tried using another app called EpocCam to connect to OBS also through NDI and the connection was much more smooth - and there was a lot less latency from what I could monitor on my phone to what OBS was monitoring - it was almost instant. The issue with EpocCam is it was not recording audio. Although I am recording audio separately from video, I use the iPhone audio in order to sync up the video after the recording. I am wondering if this choppiness was introduced because of the most recent update... my internet speeds are well above 200Mbps albeit on WiFi. I can’t really explain why just two days ago NDIHXCamera was working much better than now. Can anyone from NewTek help out? Otherwise NDIHXCamera and functionality are great. I do wish they would add ultra wide support for the iPhone 11 though.

by Hank The Handyman

We’re using NDIHXCamera via a dedicated local area network with OBS (with the NDI plugin) We connect 3 cameras to the network via lightning to Ethernet adapter. We use OBS with the NDI plugin.

Pros:
Can control exposure and focus.
Can mute the audio if unneeded.
Can switch between different output bandwidth.
Can use the front facing camera.
If using multi cam, a red box around the frame turns green.
Can switch between UDP and TCP (network stuff)

Cons/Wishlist:
No selecting specific frame rate.
No selecting specific output resolution (it’s not clear)
No selecting different lenses (zoom ultra wide)

It would be great to be able to turn down resolution when source isn’t being used to conserve network bandwidth.

It would be great when using multicam to turn on flash to show when source is live.

This might be a long shot but remote control zoom, focus, exposure would be amazing.

I would pay for in app purchases/pro version with these extra features. All around, it’s a pretty capable app, but a little more control would be clutch.

by EjGuardian

I love the idea of NDI. Still the best and easiest way to broadcast wirelessly within a network. However I don’t see why the screen needs to remain on during broadcasting, and needless draining the phone or tablets battery. DroidCam which is a similar product allows the screen to be shut off. If I need to review the "scene" I can tap the screen to turn it on. Otherwise I’m at another location viewing the camera from my encoder (VMix) and don’t need the phone discharging faster than necessary.

by Medic31w3

Decided to experiment and got myself a Belkin lightning port to Ethernet adapter to work alongside an iPhone 11 Pro while using NDIHXCamera... Works flawlessly in presenting itself into vMix as an NDI source driving 4K video into our productions...

Would love to see remote control options and support for different frame rates in a future iteration...

by Nick Nestor

From a technical perspective, NDIHXCamera (and the underlying architecture) is amazing. I had a bunch of friends over to play PC games and we did a stream of the whole thing with up to 8 different NDI sources all streaming over the network with remarkably low latency.

My ONLY request would be to extend support for older iOS versions. I have a few old devices I’d love to be able to set up as cameras for the next one!

by ElroyCat

I’ve been using this every day since April. It is rock solid good stuff!!

Recently, I have added camera operators - not just setting up 3 static shots. The operators noticed that when using NDIHXCamera to send video to Wirecast, the border around the image changed. Blue connected, Green in preview, Red the image is live. I love it, that really helps them out.

There are red covers you can put over the flash on the phone because some video software can turn on the flash when the camera is live. I don’t know if this would be a Wirecast feature or an NDI app feature to enable turning on the flash. Being able to signal to the front of the camera that it is live would be useful to let people know what camera to talk to.

by BalanceMusic

I went through every other ndi app (free apps) with very little luck gaining a stable, high definition NDI source for OBS. Setting up the stream with the tools provided was effortless and only required me to go through the process one time. I plan on upgrading to the pay app ASAP and will remain loyal to this developer.

by Tdawg_83

This is a great app if used correctly. Yes you will need 5ghz wifi. It can be used on 2.4 however found it optimal on 5ghz. Also it can be used with ethernet on same network. Make sure to use the appropriate drivers/software on your machine. Again i recommend NDIHXCamera. Excellent work NDI.

by O-Trail

NDIHXCamera is purpose built and if you use it for that purpose it’s excellent. I downloaded NDIHXCamera , launched it, opened Livestream Studio and added an NDI input and the camera feed was picked up immediately and looked crystal clear. Blows the Livestream remote app out of the water. My home WiFi is so-so and the feed was stable. Thank you very much for NDIHXCamera . You guys rock!

by Sticky Charlie

I’m running VMix on Windows 10, and literally the SECOND I opened NDIHXCamera on my phone, it popped up as an NDI signal in the input selection menu. There’s a slight bit of jittering at full quality, and in general some latency, but I’ll attribute that to not having flawless WiFi speeds where I’m at.
I like to buy things that Just. Work. - It’s the same reason I use Apple products...
Thanks guys!

by Sound-Guy-8

I have been using this for 3 weeks now with OBS.
It has a consistent 1300ms latency on my rig. Once I set the external audio interface with the correct delay, it has been great. The video did freeze a little at first and I was very disappointed. I put the WiFi in low data mode and that completely corrected it. I use it at 1080 without the ndi audio. I cannot thank you enough for this. Flawless.

by Forsoothful

I’ve been using with an old iPhone 6 and Ecamm running on a good MacBook Pro (2012). Best results when connecting the iPhone to MacBook with Ethernet cable. Also had good results when connecting a 5g TP-Link WiFi to MacBook with Ethernet cable and having the iPhone as the only device on the WiFi. I think it would be better with a modern phone but the connection is key. I like to think of the Ethernet cable as a very inexpensive HDMI on a free video camera. Try this with Ecamm. I have used this for streaming church services for 4 weeks. Just got the Ethernet connection working. Recorded excellent video to Ecamm using an Ethernet connection for over an hour.

by Toppler

The NDI tool you need to broadcast from your iPhone to your Mac is the NDI Virtual Input. This tool is currently not available for Mac, so there is no way to broadcast your IPhone cam footage into the Apps you use (Zoom, Teams, Skype etc). It would be nice to know this BEFORE you download the tools and go through all the setup. Useless for IPhone Mac combo.

by SkyMakai

BEWARE!
I spent the whole morning trying everything to get this to work on my Mac, only to find that NewTek does NOT provide the necessary driver (NDI Virtual Input) for Mac!
I had to search in the comments to forum posts to find this out after trying everything!
Don’t waste your time or money if you’re on a Mac!

by Tunedelicious

The camera app for iPhone is fine, since it controls the internal camera. But there’s a utility missing from the Mac tools package that is included in Windows: NDI Virtual Input. Without this, you cannot use the camera output in third-party apps like Zoom. So yes, you can stream into your MacBook or other MacOS device, but it’s strictly one way; you can’t output via other apps yet.

by DPM2020

Today, Newtek provided NDIHXCamera for free. I installed NDIHXCamera on my iPad, installed the NDI-OBS plugin and Newtek’s NDI tools on my PC and voila: I have a new camera source to use in OBS.

Works great on a 5 GHz WiFi connection.

Thank you Newtek for NDIHXCamera.; love it.

by BrettInMaryland

I think this is intended for ‘pro’ use but it’s a good solution for using an iOS device as a webcam should you need one.