NDI decoding problem on Ubuntu 24.04

For some time by now, developers have been encountering an issue where NDI|HX H264 decoding failed on Ubuntu 24.04.

We faced the same problem when testing NDI 6.2 SDK update in our Larix Broadcaster mobile streaming app with Nimble Streamer media server installed on Ubuntu 24.04. Larix sends NDI HX stream encoded with H.264 (AVC), and NDI library is not able to decode it. The same applies to H.265 (HEVC) streams, they also cannot be decoded in this case.

The output shows the following message:

NDI. Video decoder not found. Please visit ndi.tv/formats for help and information.

This happens because the system is missing libavcodec.so.58 H.264/H.265 decoder library required by NDI 5 used by Nimble. Following a recipe from the DistroAV community, we figured out this set of commands fixes the problem:

sudo apt install build-essential nasm
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git
cd ffmpeg
git checkout n4.4.5
./configure --enable-shared --disable-static
make -j12
DESTDIR=staging make install
cd staging/usr/local/lib
sudo cp -v `ls | grep '\.so.[0-9]*$'` /usr/local/lib
sudo ldconfig

These commands build a required library and copy it into /usr/local/lib, making it available for libndi. After that, your NDI library is able to decode H.264 and H.265 video. Let us know how it works for you.

Visit our NDI digest page to explore related features, articles, and video tutorials showing different processing and delivery workflows you can build with Larix Broadcaster and Nimble Streamer.