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Author Topic: Ext4 DCP Formatting ?uestion Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 10-24-2016 10:31 PM                     I've recently had trouble with two DCP's sent from Europe. The Doremi DCP2000 server I was trying to ingest it into could not "see" the drive and gave a "No Ingestable Content Found" error message. I took the drive down the street to another theater that tolerates me, and had no luck on the GDC and Dolby servers there either. The distributor sent a replacement DCP which worked fine. I later found out that the only difference between the two drives was that the "bad" one was formatted Ext4, and the replacement was formatted Ext3. The distributor said, in an email, that "it is becoming common practice in Europe to use Ext4 formatting on DCP drives" (according to him) So- - do any of you 'over there' know if that is true? (The distributor who told me this was in Amsterdam.) I tried making a couple of test Ext4 formatted USB drives with some DCP content on them, and so far none of the 3 servers (2 Dolby & a Doremi)can ingest from them.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 10-24-2016 11:08 PM                     Really? And no I'm not talking about the body of your post.  |  IP: Logged Gavin Lewarne Master Film Handler Posts: 278 From: Plymouth, UK Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-25-2016 04:23 AM                     I don't think it is EXT4 itself that is the issue, rather the inode size used during the drives formatting process  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-25-2016 04:58 AM                     This 'distributor' does not know what he's talking about. I have never seen or heard about an EXT4 distribution drive over here, and ISDCF drive format recommendations are valid world wide for a good reason. It was probably just a flimsy excuse for sloppy work. Gavin - the inode size is not an issue as long as you are connecting a drive directly to a DCI server - these are (mostly) Linux boxes and have no issues with the (now Linux default) inode size of 256. The inode size=128 recommendation is to take care of older systems or those servers running windows with ext-drivers or windows based TMS's relying on ext-drivers for ingest. Early versions of these drivers would only support inode size 128. These drivers in updated revisions are now able to support inode size=256 just as well, but these older DCI systems may not have been updated with these later driver versions. Not endorsing the use of inode size=256, though... - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-25-2016 06:01 AM                     Most current Linux distributions will install ext4 in default builds, some use it as their fs. Cinema servers are not using the latest versions, and tend to be skinny installations - just building the kernel and any extra packages they need. The D-cinema distribution drive standard format is ext3/ext2. The additional capabilities of ext4 are not relevant to distribution drives, even ext3 adds pointless features for a shipping drive. Your producer likely uses a recent Linux that defaulted to ext4 when they formatted the distro drive without specifying an fs. There's a standard format precisely to avoid the problem you encountered. Hopefully they has learned a lesson and will use ext2/3 in future... maybe even stop bullsh!tting that "it's the standard over here!" when a mistake is made.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 10-25-2016 02:56 PM                     And today I'm still wondering if Jim left his old job and got hired in with some marketing department at a studio making cutesy lame puns and coming up with movie titles such as Se7en.  |  IP: Logged Bajsic Bojan Expert Film Handler Posts: 190 From: Ljubljana, Si, Eu Registered: Aug 2008 posted 10-25-2016 04:33 PM                     To chime in with some experiences. In the past 2 years we got approximately 6-7 ext4 formatted drives, most local, but some from random other small production houses. None of them connected directly to our Doremis. The use of ext4 is comparable to ammount of use of HFS drives as distribution (cough cough) drives, but exFat is even more common (about two dozen or so cases, lost count). We always archive to NAS first so we don't have that many problems, and its safer and often times much faster (USB3.0 + gigabit transfer >> USB2.0 ingest). What i wanted to say is, yes, it is not unheard of, but certainly not rare. And of course, it never works. Replacement drives that do work always seem to mysteriously be formatted ext3 or NTFS.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 10-25-2016 05:55 PM                        quote: Gavin Lewarne I don't think it is EXT4 itself that is the issue, rather the inode size used during the drives formatting process. Not sure. I encounter ext2 and ext3 drives with a 256-byte inode size quite frequently, I suspect because GPartEd doesn't let you specify the inode size, and most amateur DCP makers can't be bothered to learn the mke2fs syntax and create a fully ISDCF-compliant drive. My DSS200s and Doremi DCP2000 have never had any problem reading them. However, neither will read an ext4 partition, at all, regardless of the inode size. Agreed with Carsten - flimsy excuse for sloppy work.  |  IP: Logged Gavin Lewarne Master Film Handler Posts: 278 From: Plymouth, UK Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-26-2016 07:25 PM                     another reason, on dolby server at least, is they still run pretty old 2.6 level kernels (I think, not near one to check), the sources of which support, but don't usually default to enable during compilation, ext4 support Without knowing Dolby's kernel sources in this case would make it very hard to tell If they switched to 3.2 / 4 kernels they could even support HFS native  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-26-2016 08:46 PM                     It's not necessarily an issue of the kernel version - Doremis use 2.6.18 and do support HFS+. It's what Doremi/Dolby finds necessary to implement. Unfortunately, they do not seem to find it necessary to support drives >2TB. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Gavin Lewarne Master Film Handler Posts: 278 From: Plymouth, UK Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-27-2016 05:04 AM                     Theoretically if Dolby / Doremi made any changes to kernel sources they should be GPL and therefore "out there", somewhere. It could be possible to obtain them and change the defconfig to enable these filesystem modules, recompile it and install it on the server. But its not something I would want to necessarily do, just saying theoretically possible  |  IP: Logged Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 11-04-2016 09:57 AM                     quote: Brad Miller I'm still wondering if Jim left his old job and got hired in with some marketing department at a studio making cutesy lame puns and coming up with movie titles such as Se7en. Actually, Brad, on my new job, I'm responsible for numbering film reels. LoL  |  IP: Logged

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