NDI for LED Walls: The Complete Guide (NovaStar H-Series)

NDI has quietly become the easiest way to get live video onto an LED wall. If you run NovaStar H-Series processors, the H-Series NDI Input Card lets your wall pull broadcast-quality sources straight off the network — no SDI coax, no capture cards. This guide explains what NDI is, how it compares to SDI and ST 2110, what your network needs, and how to deploy it cleanly.

What is NDI?

NDI (Network Device Interface) is an IP video standard that carries low-latency, broadcast-quality video, audio and metadata over a standard Gigabit Ethernet network. Sources — cameras, playback machines, software switchers — announce themselves on the LAN, and any receiver can subscribe to them by name. In practice that means a camera in one room and a processor in another can share video over a single network cable, with embedded audio, and you can re-route which source feeds the wall entirely in software.

Full NDI vs NDI|HX

There are two flavors you'll encounter. Full NDI uses a light, visually-lossless intraframe codec at relatively high bitrates — it's the high-quality option built for production LANs. NDI|HX is a more heavily compressed, H.264/H.265-based variant designed for bandwidth-constrained devices like PTZ cameras over Wi-Fi. The NovaStar H-Series NDI Input Card decodes Full NDI, so when your sources can send it, you keep full image quality up to 4K.

NDI vs SDI vs ST 2110 — which input should you use?

SDI is point-to-point coax: rock-solid and simple, but one cable per signal and no built-in routing. Great for a camera that lives next to the processor; painful when sources are spread across a venue.
NDI is software-defined video over your existing Gigabit network: many sources on one cable, named and re-routable, with software encoders (OBS, vMix, TriCaster) as first-class citizens. Ideal when content originates away from the wall.
SMPTE ST 2110 is the broadcast-facility standard — uncompressed, PTP-timed, and typically 25G/100G. It's the right tool for large permanent broadcast plants, but it's heavier to deploy than NDI. NovaStar offers dedicated ST 2110 input cards for those facilities.

For most rental, staging, corporate and house-of-worship LED walls, NDI hits the sweet spot of quality, flexibility and cost.

What your network needs

Full NDI is high-bandwidth — budget roughly 100–160 Mbps per 1080p60 stream and more for 4K. A few rules keep it reliable:

Gigabit everywhere in the NDI path, with managed switches.
A dedicated VLAN (or a physically separate network) for video, so NDI traffic doesn't compete with general office traffic.
IGMP snooping enabled on the switches if you use multicast NDI, so multicast streams only go where they're subscribed instead of flooding every port.
An NDI Discovery Server for larger or routed networks where mDNS auto-discovery won't cross subnets. The card supports mDNS, NDI Groups, a Discovery Server, or a manually entered source IP.

Latency

NDI adds a small, tunable amount of latency. The H-Series NDI card exposes selectable per-source latency modes — a normal/safe buffered mode for maximum stability, and lower modes for live, interactive work where every frame counts. Actual latency depends on your network and the sending device, so test your real sources on your real network.

How it works with NovaStar H-Series

The NDI Input Card drops into any input slot of an H2, H5, H9, H15 or H20 processor and connects to your video network over a single Gigabit RJ45 port (DHCP or static IP). The processor discovers available NDI senders automatically, you assign a source to a layer on the wall, and that's it. A single card decodes up to 1× 4K×2K@60, 2× 4K×1K@60, or 4× 2K×1K@60 — so one card can bring several IP sources onto the canvas at once.

Sources that just work

Anything that speaks NDI: PTZ and broadcast cameras, hardware switchers, and software like OBS Studio, vMix and NewTek TriCaster. Spin up an NDI output on the software, and it appears on the wall's source list — no capture card, no extra cabling.

Recommended hardware

If you're adding NDI to a NovaStar H-Series rig, the card you want is the NovaStar H-Series 1× NDI Input Card. As the largest US NovaStar distributor, Olympian LED stocks it in Florida with same-day shipping, 3-year warranty, and NET 30 terms for qualified businesses. Call 321-747-3220 to spec your system.

Reference: for the full technical definition of the protocol, see the official NDI documentation.