OBS to Lights

Send the OBS Studio program feed to Spectralite over NDI using the DistroAV plugin, and drive room lighting from your stream.

OBS already composites everything your audience sees. Pushing that same feed to Spectralite over NDI lets the lighting in the room track the stream, so a scene change on camera changes the practical light around it.

Install DistroAV

OBS does not send NDI on its own. The plugin that adds it is DistroAV, previously called obs-ndi. Install OBS Studio first, then install DistroAV, then restart OBS.

Turn on the NDI output

Open Tools > DistroAV NDI® Settings. Tick Main Output to broadcast the program feed, which is what most setups want. Preview Output sends the preview scene instead and is useful when you run Studio Mode and want the lights to follow what is cued rather than what is live.

Give the output a name you will recognize, something like OBS-StreamPC, since that name is what appears when other machines list NDI sources. Apply the settings and close the dialog.

If the DistroAV menu is missing, restart the computer, then check that your OBS Studio, DistroAV, and NDI Runtime versions all match DistroAV's current requirements. The runtime is the part people forget, and a mismatch there stops the plugin loading without an error. NDI publishes its own OBS setup guide covering the same ground.

Pick up the stream in Spectralite

Go to Edit > Inputs > NDI, then switch on NDI input enabled and Auto-discover sources.

Put the video on your fixtures

Add a Timeline layer with the built-in NDI Input effect, or build something specific around an NDI Input node in the Node Editor.

Preview output as a lighting cue

Studio Mode is the reason to care about the difference between the two outputs. Sending Preview Output to Spectralite means the room reacts when you cue a scene, a beat before you transition it on camera. Sending Main Output keeps the light locked to what viewers actually see. Enable both and you have two named sources to choose between.

Encoding for NDI costs CPU on the OBS machine, which is the same machine already encoding your stream. If frames start dropping, lower the OBS output resolution before blaming the network.

Receive video from another app: performance and troubleshooting for every NDI source.
NDI input dialog: what each setting does.
Connect Your Software: guides for other applications.