Discovery Service

Overview

In modern networked media environments, efficient discovery and management of NDI® audio and video sources are essential for scalable, low-latency workflows.

The NDI Discovery Service is an OS-managed background process that runs the NDI Discovery Server the centralized registry for NDI sources and receivers and exposes its proprietary API for client access.

It provides a more predictable and scalable method for registering and locating NDI sources and receivers. It is especially valuable in networks where multicast traffic is restricted or discouraged, such as cloud-hosted or enterprise environments.

Why Use Discovery Service?

Traditional NDI discovery uses mDNS, which works well on smaller networks but can cause congestion or fail in multicast-restricted environments. The Discovery Service introduces a centralized registry model that:

• Reduces unnecessary network chatter.

• Enables reliable operation across subnets and firewalled segments.

• Offers real-time updates and visibility into connected NDI sources and receivers.

• Supports enhanced monitoring and control features introduced in NDI 6.2.

Flexible Deployment

Discovery Service is flexible. You can run it as a background service on Windows or Linux or run the Discovery Server as a standalone command-line application. All with minimal resource usage.

Additionally, it can be run on a local machine or hosted remotely to serve multiple clients.

It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit environments (64-bit recommended). Installation packages are available from ndi.video.

Client Configuration

NDI clients, including senders, finders, and receivers, can be configured to use the Discovery Service in place of or alongside mDNS. This ensures broader compatibility across different segments of the network. It also means users will have greater control over which sources are visible to specific devices. As part of the 6.2 update, seamless integration using Access Manager or the new NDI Discovery Tool, are both included in the NDI Tools suite.

Developer Integration

The NDI SDK includes new APIs that allow developers to query available NDI sources via the Discovery Service and subscribe to real-time updates. You can now also monitor and control receiver connections.

These capabilities unlock tighter integrations with third-party applications and more sophisticated media control workflows. For implementation details, see the SDK documentation under NDI-Recv Discovery, Monitor, and Control.

Click here to view the full Discovery Service documentation in our SDK which includes instructions, configuration options, and command-line usage on both Windows and Linux.

Discovery Server vs Discovery Service

The NDI Discovery Service is designed to allow you to replace the automatic discovery NDI uses (mDNS) with a server that operates as a centralized registry of NDI sources. The NDI Discovery Server is a command-line application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux which provides the NDI Discovery Service. Multiple instances of the NDI Discovery Server can be used to provide redundancy.

This can be very helpful for installations where you wish to avoid having significant mDNS traffic for a large number of sources. It can also be useful when multicast is not possible or desirable. It is very common for cloud computing services not to allow multicast traffic. When using the Discovery Service NDI can operate entirely in unicast mode and thus in almost any installation. The Discovery Service supports all NDI functionality, including NDI groups. Clients should be configured to connect with the Discovery Server(s) instead of using mDNS to locate sources.

When the Discovery Service is available, NDI applications will use both mDNS and the Discovery Server(s) to find and receive sources on the local network that are not on machines configured to use discovery.