Guide · Outputs

How to get NDI, SRT, RTSP or HDMI out of an iPhone.

iPhones don't speak NDI or SRT natively — and pretending otherwise is how setups get flaky. The working pattern: the phone sends one clean feed to a free Mac receiver, and the Mac does the distribution.

Airlive team 4 min read

The honest layout

The phone runs Airlive Camera (free; iPhone 11+, iOS 17+) and streams over an open protocol to Airlive Bridge on your Mac (free, macOS 13+). Bridge takes whatever is on Program and republishes it to every output you switch on. The phone stays light — one feed, one job — and the Mac, which has the CPU and wired network for it, handles the fan-out.

Setup in three steps

  1. Install Bridge on the Mac and Airlive Camera on the phone (free on the App Store).
  2. Connect: Airlive Camera → Live → pick the Mac; the phone appears as a Bridge channel.
  3. CUT the channel to Program and enable outputs in the right rail.
The Program Outputs rail in Airlive Bridge, listing NDI, OBS Airlive Bridge, HDMI Out, SRT and RTSP
The output rail in Bridge — switch on as many as you need, at once.

What each output is for

  • NDI®Local network
  • SRTNetwork / WAN
  • RTSPPull by URL
  • HDMI / AirPlaySecond screen

NDI® — the program appears as a source on your network for any NDI-aware software or hardware to pick up. This is the "drop an iPhone into an existing production" path.

SRT — point it at whatever expects an SRT ingest: a hardware decoder, a streaming service, a remote studio across the internet.

RTSP — for tools that pull streams by URL: media servers, monitoring software, recorders.

HDMI / AirPlay — a clean program picture on a second screen: a projector, a venue TV, or a hardware switcher's HDMI input via an adapter.

And OBS gets its own path, which needs no plugin at all: Bridge publishes the program as a system camera called "Airlive Bridge Virtual Camera", so OBS takes it with a Video Capture Device source on the same Mac.

It is also the fastest of these paths to switch on. A compressed stream belongs to the camera that produced it, so every cut made the receiver resynchronise and the picture held for a moment. The virtual camera carries frames, which have nothing to resynchronise — the cut is instant, and the picture is not re-compressed on the way.

FAQ

Can the phone output NDI directly? No — and that's deliberate. Distribution is heavy, phones are battery-powered and wireless; the Mac does the heavy lifting while the phone just sends one clean feed. (That split is also part of the thermal story.)

Several outputs at once? Yes — every enabled output carries the program simultaneously.

Several cameras? That's the whole point of Bridge: a multicam multiview in front of these outputs, with the same fixed latency on every channel.

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