Question / Help Skype NDI + OBS : multiple audio echoes with multiple source

Andros.Rizzi

New Member
Hello to everybody!

I searched through this amazing forum and even if something similar to this has been asked before, I would like to ask for your help.
I'm using Skype as NDI source in OBS Studio, and with 1 source everything is ok. I get the audio from the participant and the video perfectly in sync.
But when more than 1 source is placed inside a scene, the audio from each of the sources come out in the live or recording.
Everything else on the audio side is deactivated: my microphone, my desktop audio ecc...only the NDI sources audio are present in the mixer.

For example:
Person 1 talk: I get person 1 audio and video perfectly in sync but also the delayed audio which is (in my understanding) the one that Skype is sending to person 2.
Person 2 talk: same situation as before, but inverted of course.

If I mute one of the two person on the mixer (e.g. Person 2), i get:
Person 1 audio/video perfectly in sync and Person 2 audio out-of-sync from the video

This confirms to me that the echoing audio is incoming from the Person 2 audio of Person 1.
And this is not some sort of "audio going from the speakers of one person into his microphone", because I tried also with everyone wearing headphones.
And also, I'm muted in OBS and I don't hear myself speaking through Person 1 or 2 NDI audio.

So....I think that this problem cannot be solved, but I wrote it anyway in case someone has this same question.
I think that this is not an OBS Studio problem but a Skype problem instead, as it sends to OBS not just the audio stream of the person involved, but also the Person 1 audio that it is sending to the Person 2.

Maybe someone could help...otherwise, dear reader, you are not alone!

A temporary fix for me was to not have more than 1 person in 1 scene. I switch from Person 1 and Person 2 scenes but of course in this way they cannot interact during the live stream.
 
Problem is Skype's NDI implementation. It sends video feeds with ALL participant audio attached, instead of just only the audio originating from the participant providing the chosen video feed.

I presume this was done despite the potential problems with sync in order to make use and setup easier-- without it you'd need to set up scenes with one audio/video and multiple audio only NDI feeds, or else each participant would be solo'd when you switched scenes.

I'd prefer that, obviously, but it seems like Skype thought about it differently.
 
I'm not currently aware of another videoconferencing product that doesn't.. at least, not a reasonably priced one.

Vmix Call I think does not do this. But it's a significant investment compared to Skype (free).

Zoom does not support NDI.

Google Hangouts does not. Whereby does not.

You might be able to cobble together a makeshift web conference system by having everyone stream FTL out of OBS to Mixer.com and having all other participants open each others' streams, but this puts a lot of burden on participants.
 
Ok, thank you very much for your support.
The strange thing (to me) is that several videos on YouTube which explain this NDI method (such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jty07K3Xa2A) doesn't mention this issue. This means that:
A: in older Skype version this was not an issue
B: they found a workaround for the audio issue e.g. they mute the other participants and only output 1 audio (forgetting about the delay)
 
Under ideal conditions where all participants have stable, low latency connections, this would be less noticeable. A single audio stream with multiple video angles works as long as all those video streams are low latency and stable.
 
I think that this OBS tool could help solve the problem! obs.ninja
I'll try to set all the persons connected by skype AND through the obs.ninja tool
 
I'm not sure if that is in active development anymore. It has a note for Mac users saying they need to use v23 because it doesn't work with v24 or v25.

As far as I can tell, this is a front end for a webserver that's running WebRTC. So it's basically what you'd get if everybody streamed their own streams to Mixer, and then one copy of OBS used each of those streams as a browser source. This can work well, I did it for quite some time, ninja just dispenses with the use of the mixer.com platform in favor of their own proprietary server instead.

As I read it this is an alternative to Skype, you probably wouldn't want everyone running both-- if you did so, you'd likely need all of them also running virtualcam to avoid cam driver exclusivity.
 
I discovered obs.ninja since I found this video:
About the last sentence, I did a Skype call with a friend of mine today and we tried to connect with obs.ninja and everything seemed to work (about cam driver exclusivity).
 
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