Teams turns NDI stream off after a few seconds or minutes... !

Question

Since about a month we experience the issue that after enabling NDI in a Meeting the NDI Streams are becoming availlable as they should and we can connect e.g. the active speaker NDI stream. Then after e few seconds or a minute the NDI stream drops and the message appears in the call --> Broadcast capabilities is turned off. You're no longer using Broadcast capabilities to broadcast or share this meeting.

When checking the settings Teams still shows NDI Broadcasting as on. Disable and re-enable the broadcast in the call do not bring the NDI stream back. Serversides and in the basic settings of the teams client the Production Capabilities are turned on.
Updating the Teams Client to the latest version did not solve the issue.

We experienced the same issue with different accounts that worked before.

Any suggestions why this happens? Or others that experienced the same problem?

Answer 1

We had this issue yesterday afternoon during our monthly technology town hall to the enterprise. I was very surprised to see you were having the same issues we were having. The only difference is we bring our NDI Teams sources into Wirecast. We have had the same workflow for over the past year as well. We didn't have these issues a month ago during our last event. I spent the day trying to figure out the issue. I can recreate the issue repeatedly (see first video link). Ultimately from my end, I think it could be an issue with the Mac version of the Teams app and how the Apple Monterey OS works. Below are details. @Reto , you mentioned using a Tricaster, which uses Windows, so I wonder if there is a common issue in both the Windows/Mac versions of Teams that I might be missing.

We had a tech check meeting on Tuesday and all the NDI sources came into Wirecast fine. But the day of the event yesterday, the first person to come into Teams didn't work with NDI. I tried relaunching applications and even restarting the machine with no difference. In the moment, we had to use our pre-pandemic method of screen grabbing a Teams meeting from a capture card to send to Youtube.

Today's troubleshooting, I first cleared Teams cache, uninstalled/reinstalled Teams, checked for updates. Had the newest version of Wirecast 15.0.1. Installed the newest NDI tools for Mac version 5.1.2.9. After the problem continued, I even tried a prior version of Wirecast 14.3.4 and got the same issue. Note that we did recently upgrade to from Catalina to Monterey 2 weeks ago.

On a Mac (Monterey): NDI doesn't work from Teams to Wirecast, or from Teams to NDI viewer; but it does work from Teams to OBS. NDI outputs from both OBS and NDI Test Patterns to Wirecast show up.

NDI Issues May 2022: https://youtu.be/2-tYJ38kZRk (note the first example where the notification in Teams changes goes on/off repeatedly and the connection status in Wirecast goes Not Connected/Receiving repeatedly on the left)

On a PC (Windows 10): NDI works from Teams to Wirecast, OBS and NDI viewer. I didn't see any issues on PC. I would just use a high performance PC but currently our only high end machine is a Mac Cylinder Pro.

So basically at this point I thought that there's something not right with the Mac version of Teams and/or Wirecast on the Mac.

I came across Wirecast forum of someone having similar issues and the moderator suggested to check to make sure ports 5454 and 5960-59xx were open. The moderator also said that this range might not be necessary for OBS, which would explain the above situation.

https://telestreamforum.forumbee.com/t/60hdqr9/ndi-just-doesnt-seem-to-work-in-wirecast-15

I couldn't readily figure out how to look at the ports in use since Network Utility was discontinued in Monterey. However I did find a blog post talking about how Monterey uses ports in the 5000 and 7000 range and that it can be problematic for software developers. The post talks about how the "AirPlay Receiver" feature uses these ports and that it should be turned off to avoid conflict.

https://chrishannah.me/monterey-blocking-ports-5000-and-7000/

However, the "Airplay Receiver" option isn't visible on my machine. The next link I found from Apple basically said that if I don't see the option, then it's a feature managed by my IT department. Which we have seen before with other features in our enterprise.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-airplay-receiver-preferences-on-mac-mchl15c9e4b5/mac#:~:text=If%20your%20Mac%20is%20enrolled%20in%20a%20mobile%20device%20management%20(MDM)%20system%2C%20the%20AirPlay%20Receiver%20option%20may%20be%20unavailable.

I found the Airplay process in the Activity Monitor and force quit the process, but it made no difference. The process just instantly restarted and I still had the problem of the NDI sources turning on/off in Teams and Wirecast. I don't even know if that is part of the problem. I'm waiting to hear back from my IT department to see if we can figure out Airplay but ultimately, we might have to use our old school workaround of screen capturing a teams meeting to stream out in the meantime. If anyone else can try disabling Airplay to see if that helps, let me know.

Microsoft, please look into this issue. Everyone else, please chime in if you're having similar issues.