OMNIPLEX: A Unified System for Streaming Realtime Data

1. Introduction

Nearly every device on a modern stage or studio desk carries a USB-C port, and yet signal still routes through audio interfaces and video capture cards — rounds of unnecessary analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion between machines that are each already digital. The premise of this work is simple: go USB-C to USB-C and stop converting. Rather than a pile of single-purpose adapters, one cable and one system should carry audio, video, and control data between any two (or more) machines, with the stream arriving on the host as if it were native hardware.

This positions the project alongside — and against — the current landscape of class-compliant audio interfaces, NDI-style video-over-IP, and per-protocol control transports (MIDI, OSC), each of which solves one slice of the problem with its own cable, driver, and configuration story.

2. System Design

The proposed system has three layers:

• Negotiation. A frontend lets the devices on the link or network decide, in network, who will send audio or video signals — roles are elected rather than fixed by which box owns the capture hardware.
• Virtual devices. The system defines virtual audio interfaces and video signals on the host machine by installing low-level OS drivers, so the host sees each incoming stream as a native audio or video device with no additional configuration — any DAW, streaming tool, or video application can consume it immediately.
• Bandwidth visibility. The UI graphically visualizes the total bandwidth of the cable and which data is occupying how much of it, making the invisible budget of a USB-C or Ethernet link a first-class, inspectable object.

Internet-scale streaming is an acknowledged implication of the architecture, but the present priority is the lowest-latency path over a physical cable.