ATEM Bridge

The ATEM Bridge is a small, fanless single-board computer that sits between a Blackmagic ATEM switcher and a Q-SYS Core. It speaks the binary ATEM UDP protocol on one side, exposes a clean TCP command stream on the other, and absorbs the parsing, state tracking, and reconnection work that would otherwise burn cycles inside Lua.

Ships with the ATEM Controller Q-SYS plugin. The bridge and the plugin are sold and shipped as one product. The bridge has no purpose without the plugin, and the plugin will not function without the bridge. See the ATEM Controller plugin page for the Q-SYS side of the pairing.

What it actually does

• Maintains a persistent ATEM session, reconnects automatically, and republishes the switcher’s program, preview, transition, and tally state on a stable TCP port
• Emits compact, line-delimited messages that the Q-SYS plugin consumes with near-zero parsing cost
• Provides a Flask-based web UI for configuration and live monitoring, accessible from any browser on the LAN
• Runs from a fresh boot in under fifteen seconds with no SSH required for normal operation

Why this exists

We would have shipped a Lua-only plugin if a Q-SYS Core could have kept up. Lua is single-threaded, and the ATEM protocol’s polling rate is chatty enough that one thread cannot service it without dropping events: state goes stale, tally lags, cuts get missed. The bridge moves that work onto a dedicated device that does one thing reliably and frees the Core for everything else.