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January 29, 2008
BBC moves Linux into TV production
Research team develops Ingex for tapeless TV-making using Linux
By Rodney Gedda
Expensive and error-prone digital tapes have forced the BBC to look at using computers running Linux to help produce its programmes.
Speaking at the annual linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Melbourne, Australia, Stuart Cunningham from BBC research, said copying digital tapes was a slow process as it must be done in real-time.
"The key to solving digital tape problem is with standards-based files in the MXF (material exchange format) as you can store more in less space," Cunningham said.
To solve this problem, the BBC Research team developed Ingex for tapeless TV production using Linux.
Ingex is used to get the TV footage from the studio into the post-production editing suite by intercepting it via the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), a digital broadcast standard, rather than from tape.
"Ingex is a low-cost, file-base production system where a commodity PC with an SDI capture card that does software encoding with ffmpeg and writes MXF files, which can be stored on a NAS server or a USB drive," Cunningham said, adding a USB drive can be physically transported to post-production.
Once the USB drive arrives at post production, the AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) and MXF files are copied to the Avid editing "bin" for post-production.
The team set up two dual quad-core Intel systems with 4Gb of RAM and 4Tb of disk storage with the XFS file system. OpenSUSE Linux is the operating system.
The XFS file system was found to have the best performance for getting high bit-rate video to disk, and an open source developer was contracted to develop a DVCPRO50 codec for ffmpeg which resulted in a better decoder than many of the hardware based decoders, according to Cunningham.
"The goal of this is to get rid of all tapes [as] we save the time in manually processing tapes," he said.
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Comments received
Michael Christian said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
This is nothing to be proud of. Just a College student "Beer Budget" solution to a major corporation needs. How can you sleep at night without even having a RAID5? Just my $.02.
I think this is extremely awesome. said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
Being that this is open source and thereby anyone who wishes will be able to use the software to work with television programming.
This could mean a slew of small budget tv stations popping up. I think this could be a great thing.
Jimmy L said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
Yay. Finally, some solid backing for Linux. Watch Microsoft shake in its boots now! Or, watch BBC switch back to MS software next year...
If you're a drudge fan: <a href="http://www.drudgetracker.com">drudgetracker.com</a>
FPM said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
I used to be a homeless rodeo clown but now I am a world class magician !
Winging Pom said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
Before they invest in their next version, I think they should contract a *real* storage expert and get her to explain to them why XFS on RAID-5 as a staging area is not very smart.
But that aside, it is great to see them taking advantage and then giving back through open source software.
Uh? said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
How the hell does this constitute news?
The fact somebody out there is using Linux for webservers is that baffling?
Truth be told, we actually use Macintoshes for most of what we do (go ahead: Google it if you don't believe me) because it's extremely scalable and despite what you often hear, it is also very open.
This is fanboy masturbation.
Nobody cares.
nicholas fellows said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
"forced" .... makes it sounds like using linux is a bad thing.
Tomy James said on Thursday, 06 March 2008
Forced is often the reallity. People need to be shaken to break with their routine. Once forced to try Linux and open source, most become willing converts. Volunteers are preferable. Those coerced to join us should be made welcome
RE: How the hell does this constitute news? said on Sunday, 09 March 2008
Is it not OK that people want to see linux become more common? The more companies that use it, the better the support for desktop linux is likely to be. Certainly, the fact that the BBC are using it won't change anything DIRECTLY, but they do have a big influence over other companies and other people.
"Nobody cares": Well, you mean YOU don't care. The story has over 1200 diggs, so don't make sweeping statements like that.
motie38 said on Sunday, 07 June 2009
<EM>The team set up two dual quad-core Intel systems with 4Gb of RAM and 4Tb of disk storage with the XFS file system.</EM>
Did you mean 4GB of RAM and 4TB of disk storage? There's still a difference in (b)its and (B)ytes by a factor of 8.