OmniBridge — Operator Guide

These docs are written for AV engineers running the show, not developers — it's about using the dashboard on a real production, not how it's built.

Read this first: there is no login. Anyone who can reach the dashboard's address and port (8080) has full control of every route. Keep 8080 closed to the internet at your firewall, and open only the ingest ports your field encoders actually call in on. See Ports and Troubleshooting for the port list and Known Issues for what "no login" means in practice.

What this is

OmniBridge is a routing gateway: field encoders (cameras, laptops, OBS rigs) push their video in over the internet, and you route each one to a slot on your production switcher (vMix or similar) from a web dashboard — live, without restarting anything. You can also send a return/preview feed back out to the field, and push a copy of any feed out to external hardware or streaming platforms.

Think of it like a router/switcher for network video: sources are your inputs, destinations are where video goes.

The dashboard lives on the gateway itself — no separate install. Point a browser at http://<gateway-ip>:8080 (the gateway's own IP/hostname on your network, port 8080) and it's right there.

Not sure what computer to run it on? See System Requirements for passthrough and transcoding sizing.

Mid-show quick reference

Something wrong right now? Start here before digging into the rest of these docs:

1. Feed drop or looks wrong? Check Diagnostics for RTT/loss spikes or a Last Error on that row. If a field decoder is showing a plain "STANDBY" slate instead of your real feed, that's the gateway itself telling you nothing real is flowing to that particular route right now (see "No-signal slate" on Ports and Troubleshooting) — it's expected behavior, not a bug, and it'll switch back the instant real content resumes.
2. Something changed unexpectedly? Check Events — a timestamped log of every route/preset change and connect/disconnect this session.
3. Need to get back to a known-good state fast? Apply a saved Preset from the Operate tab.

See Ports and Troubleshooting for the full checklist once you've narrowed down what's wrong.

The two core concepts

• Source — a field encoder somewhere on the internet, pushing its stream in to this gateway.
• Destination — where a source's feed (or another destination's program-out) gets routed to. Most destinations are vMix/OBS-style, with 3 input slots and a program-out feed you can route back to the field. Some destinations are simpler: a single feed going straight out to one piece of external hardware or a streaming platform (e.g. an Epiphan box, or YouTube).

Both sources and destinations can speak more than one protocol — see Adding Sources and Destinations for which one to pick for your specific encoder or hardware.

Unfamiliar term? See the Glossary.

Your first route, end to end

A concrete example — an OBS laptop's camera feed needs to reach a vMix box across the building, with a preview sent back to the laptop:

1. Setup tab → Add source → name it, type "OBS / vMix / generic encoder (SRT push)" → note the ingest address/port shown on its card. Make sure that port is open on the gateway's firewall (and nothing else is: keep 8080 closed to the internet).
2. On the OBS laptop, point its Stream output at that address (see the OBS Setup Guide for exact fields).
3. Setup tab → Add destination → name it, type "vMix / OBS (SRT, 3 slots + program-out)", host = the vMix machine's LAN IP → note its 3 slot ports.
4. On the vMix machine, add 3 SRT inputs in Listener mode on those ports (see the vMix Setup Guide).
5. Operate tab → drag the source tile onto one of the destination's slot tiles. Both tiles should go green within a few seconds.
6. Optional — send a preview back to the OBS laptop: still on Operate, drag the destination's header onto the source's return zone (see below). Set up an SRT Media Source in OBS to receive it (the OBS guide covers this too).

If anything doesn't connect, Ports and Troubleshooting has a checklist.

Getting started

Reaching the dashboard: open a browser to http://<gateway-address>:8080 — whatever machine OmniBridge is running on. There's no login screen and no account to create; whoever can reach that address and port has full control, permanently — see Known Issues for what that means in practice and how to manage the risk. Network access is your access control: don't expose port 8080 to the open internet, and treat it the same as any other unauthenticated production control surface (same LAN/VPN as your other show equipment, not a public IP).

Where the gateway itself needs to live: it needs to be reachable from two different directions at once — from the public internet (so remote field encoders can call in as sources) and from your local venue/production network (so it can dial out to vMix/OBS destinations on that network). In practice this usually means a small cloud VM or an on-prem box with a public IP, connected into your venue network by whatever means you'd normally use (VPN, direct routing, etc.) — the two directions are independent, so a source's connection and a destination's connection never share a network path.

Closing the browser, or restarting the gateway, loses nothing. The dashboard is just a window onto state saved on the gateway itself, and your sources, destinations and routing are written to disk the moment you change them. Live connections do drop during a restart and reconnect on their own. Details in the FAQ below.

Multiple people, multiple tabs: any number of browsers can have the dashboard open at once, all seeing the same live state — there's no per-user login or role separation, so anyone with the dashboard open can make routing changes. A change one person makes (a reroute, an added source) appears live for everyone else's open tab within a second or two. Works on any current desktop browser; the drag-and-drop routing on Operate isn't designed for touch, so a phone/tablet is fine for checking Diagnostics or Events mid-show but not for actively routing.

Licensing: each install needs an active license, capped on the number of sources and destinations you can configure (unlimited is also possible, depending on your license). Hitting the cap only blocks adding a new source or destination — every source/destination you've already configured, and every connection already running, keeps working normally. Manage activation, see your current usage, or start a self-service 30-day trial (limited to 3 sources and 1 destination) from the About tab — the trial includes every add-on for the full 30 days, so you can try the complete feature set before deciding what to buy. To buy a license or add capacity, see the store.

Add-ons: SRT and UDP MPEG-TS sources/destinations are included with every license, no add-on needed. RTMP, RIST, NDI, and the Peplink InControl2 integration are each separately-licensed add-ons — the Add source/Add destination dropdown still lists them, but picking one without the matching add-on gets rejected. The Pro bundle covers every current add-on and any we add later, automatically, at no extra charge. The planned High Availability add-on is the exception and will be sold separately.

Frequently asked questions

Does closing the browser tab lose anything? No. The dashboard is only a viewer/controller for state that already lives entirely on the gateway — there's nothing "unsaved" in your browser. Close it, reopen it later (even from a different computer), and everything is exactly as you left it.

If the gateway restarts, do I have to recreate my sources, destinations or routing? No. Every source, destination and route is written to disk the moment you make the change and reloaded automatically at startup, whether or not you've ever saved a preset. Presets are an optional extra for recalling a named routing layout. What a restart does cost you: every live connection drops and then reconnects on its own with the same configuration, and the Events log (a live session record) starts empty.

What actually happens to a source/destination's port number if I delete something and add a new one? Existing sources/destinations never have their ports move. A newly-added one can land on a port a previously-deleted one used to occupy, though — see the port reference on Ports and Troubleshooting for exactly how that numbering works.

What happens when I hit my license's source/destination cap? Only adding a new source or destination is blocked. Everything already configured, and every connection already running, is completely unaffected.

Is there a login or any access control inside the dashboard itself? No — see Known Issues for what that means and how to manage it at the network level instead.

Pages in these docs

• Adding Sources and Destinations — overview of every encoder/software/hardware type this supports, with real dashboard screenshots: OBS, vMix, hardware UDP encoders, YouTube/Twitch, RIST appliances, and more.
• OBS Setup Guide — exact settings for OBS in both directions: pushing a source in (Stream tab), and receiving a return/destination feed (Media Source settings).
• vMix Setup Guide — exact settings for vMix: receiving routed slots as SRT inputs, and sending a program-out/return feed as an SRT output.
• Ports and Troubleshooting — what ports to open on your firewall, what the status dots mean, the automatic "no-signal" slate shown on an idle return/forward feed instead of silence, and what to check when something isn't connecting.
• Diagnostics and Signal Flow — the Diagnostics view (connection health, RTT/loss/retransmits, reconnect history) and how to read the gateway's signal flow end to end.
• Peplink Integration — setting up the Peplink InControl2 add-on: live WAN status, cellular signal metrics, PepVPN tunnel stats, connected clients, and automatic source-to-device matching.
• Sending a Support Report — how to send us a diagnostics report (what's included, what's automatically redacted), and how automatic crash reporting works.
• Glossary — plain-language definitions of source, destination, slot, program-out, return feed, caller/listener, ingest, and latency.
• Known Issues — current limitations worth knowing about before a show, not bugs waiting to be filed.
• NDI Setup Guide — how NDI source/destination discovery works on your network, and what to check when something isn't showing up where you expect it.
• Future Plan — what's on the roadmap and what's deliberately not, so you know what to expect (and not expect) in a coming release.

Routing, both directions

On the Operate tab, every source and destination shows up as a draggable tile. There are two different drags, feeding two different things:

• Drag a source tile onto a destination tile to send that source's feed into that destination's input — the main "get video from A to B" action.
• Drag a destination's header onto a source's return zone (the small strip below a source's own tile) to send that destination's program-out feed back to that source, as a return/preview feed — e.g. so a field camera operator can see the program mix they're contributing to. This is the reverse direction from the first drag, and it's a separate, optional step — most sources never need a return feed at all.

Both directions apply the same way to single-feed destinations (Epiphan, a streaming platform, a RIST box) as to a 3-slot vMix/OBS destination — one tile, drag-and-drop, no separate picker.

A tab bar above the destinations grid — All Destinations plus one tab per destination — lets an operator focus on just one destination's slots without losing sight of the full source list; sources are never filtered by this, only the destinations grid narrows. Defaults to All Destinations.

Presets

The bar at the top of Operate lets you save the current routing — every source-to-slot patch, every return feed — as a named preset, and re-apply it later in one click instead of re-dragging everything by hand. Applying a preset resets the whole matrix to exactly that saved state: anything not listed in the preset gets cleared, not just left alone. Useful for "default show layout" or "reset everything before rehearsal."

The dashboard's tabs

The nav bar groups its six tabs — Operate, Diagnostics, Events, Setup, Help, and About — into two visual clusters: what you touch during a show, and what you touch once setting up or occasionally for reference. Every tab is still one click away either way; nothing's behind a menu.

Live-ops cluster:

• Operate (the default view) — the live routing matrix described above, sized to fill the actual browser window rather than a fixed layout.
• Diagnostics — one table, every source's Ingest/Return and every destination's Slot 1-3/Program-out grouped under its own name, with the same red/yellow/green status meaning as Operate's tiles, plus bitrate, uptime, reconnect count, and (for native-SRT connections) real RTT/packet loss/retransmit numbers. See Diagnostics and Signal Flow.
• Events — a rolling, timestamped audit log: routes applied/removed, presets applied, and connect/disconnect for sources, program-out, and return feeds. Doesn't survive a restart — it's a live session log, not a permanent record (unlike your routing/preset configuration, which does survive). Check here first when troubleshooting "it worked a minute ago" (see Ports and Troubleshooting).

Setup/reference cluster:

• Setup — three columns: gateway network interface (which local network field encoders connect to) on the left, then add/remove sources and destinations and their ports/SRT-override settings. Narrower windows drop to two columns, then one, before it gets cramped. No routing happens here — that's all on Operate.
• Help — an in-app quick reference, shorter than these docs.
• About — running version, and license management (activation, usage, trial).