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Comment by danabrams | Hacker News Reader

Can't say I blame them for the removal of libndi-newtek, given the situation, but I wish FFMpeg (and gstreamer) had ndi support.

Would love to see an open source NDI, but I know newtek will never allow it.

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Please check GStreamer NDI source elements in: https://github.com/teltek/gst-plugin-ndi

Offtopic: GStreamer and rust are a powerful combination.

That is actually really sad. I wonder what are the chances of someone reimplementing NDI support as FOSS?

I don’t think it’s just an implementation problem. I think there are patent issues preventing this.

Newtek should really bite the bullet and just open source, and make their money on the hardware.

I don’t think it has anything to do with patents. Anyone can use the library for free. NewTek just doesn’t want to open source the library.

Even though they don’t charge for the library, they have a lot riding on the perception of the quality of their protocol. If they allow third party implementations and some of them suck, it might tarnish NDI’s image (and indirectly hurt them via the money they make on hardware).

Edit: I’m certainly not arguing that any particular implementation does suck, just saying that I can see why they might want to protect IP they don’t make money from directly.

Patents aren’t as much of an issue on software outside the US so it’s theoretically doable legally, it would just be like the situation with mp3 etc, Americans would have to snag the packages hosted from outside the US.

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