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.

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.

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 "technical difficulties" 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.

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 tab/webpage does nothing. The dashboard is just a viewer/controller for state that already lives entirely on the gateway — there's nothing "unsaved" in your browser to lose. Close it, reopen it later, and everything is exactly as you left it.

Restarting the gateway itself (a deploy, a crash, a reboot) is a different question, and the short answer is: you never have to recreate your sources, destinations, or routing. Every source, every destination, and whatever's currently routed (every slot, every return feed) is written to disk the moment you make the change — not on a timer, not only when you shut down cleanly — and all of it is loaded back automatically the next time the gateway starts. This happens automatically whether or not you've ever saved a preset — presets are a separate, optional convenience for recalling a named routing layout on demand, not a requirement for your current routing to survive a restart. The one thing that does not survive a restart is the Events log (see below), which is a live session record only, not written to disk.

What a restart does cost you is live connections themselves — every active source and destination connection drops, because that's an actual live network session, not something a restart can preserve. But each one starts retrying and automatically reconnects the moment the gateway is back up, using the exact same configuration it had before — the same behavior as any single connection dropping and recovering, just happening to everything at once instead of one endpoint.

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 from the About tab. To buy a license or add capacity, see the store.

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 and destinations? No. Every source, destination, and route is written to disk the moment you make the change and reloaded automatically the next time the gateway starts. The only thing that doesn't survive a restart is the Events log. See "Restarting the gateway itself" above for what does happen to active connections in the meantime.

Does the current routing (what's patched into which slot) survive a restart, or do I need to save a preset first? It survives on its own, automatically, whether or not you've ever touched presets. Presets are a separate, optional convenience — a named snapshot of a routing layout you can save and re-apply later — not a requirement for your current routing to persist.

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.
• Known Issues — current limitations worth knowing about before a show, not bugs waiting to be filed.
• 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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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).