Poor Mans Library Server / Ingest Point

[Justin d'Entremont]

I'm looking at setting up a "Poor mans library server", a computer with 5 or 6 CRU slots in it that I can pop DCP drives into, and then (hopefully without ever having to copy the content onto said computer) ingest the movies into the screen servers over the network. Does anyone use something like this that they could share how you have it setup (OS, software etc)?

In other news, what does a real LMS / TMS cost these days?

[Steve Guttag]

Seemingly, CineDigital is a good starting point for people setting up such a server. They even will let you try it out for a week and is free for up to 2-screens. It runs on a Windows computer and doesn't require a lot of space or processing power. https://www.cinedigitalmanager.com/en/

I'm not sure your plan of using a TMS as just the ingest point (not storing local) for remote servers will be a happy one. It will likely be rather slow transfers but, in a sense any computer that can support the Linux file formats of CRU drives could "FTP" content form the drive to the server but with all of the buffering, transfer rates will be rough. Why not ingest into the TMS/LMS and let it push content later...also I've yet to find a plex that needed more than 4 ingest slots.

If you have options like DCDC, then you could have the individual server just pull the content over and skip the middle man.

The problem arises though, most servers can't ingest worth a flip while they're showing movies (the Dolby DSS servers being the notable exception) so you are almost always better off to ingest to a LMS and let it push them out when time is available between shows or after hours.

[Justin d'Entremont]

Right now I do this for trailers. We have a single USB 2.0 CRU bay hooked up to the office computer (Win 10), which is running a program called ext2 Volume Manager to mount the linux partition, and then FileZilla FTP server pointed to the drive root. The servers all have this FTP point, and it works quite well, with two exceptions:

1. It's currently limited by the speed of the USB 2.0 CRU interface
2. Every time you swap the drive, you manually have to open ext2VM, locate the linux drive without a drive letter, and tell it to assign a drive letter.

Over gigabit ethernet via FTP, ingesting from one playback server to another is actually faster then directly ingesting from the CRU DCP drive, so I would think that this would still be the limiting factor if I could have a SATA interface to the drives.

My thought was to have a tower or rack unit where I could plug the 3-4 drives of what we're playing that week, along with the TrailMix drive into one location. (Reason being, our booths aren't all connected / in the same place.)


CineDigital doesn't seem like a bad option. If the professional version is sub $1,750 this might be a wise investment for us.

[Leo Enticknap]

Over gigabit ethernet via FTP, ingesting from one playback server to another is actually faster then directly ingesting from the CRU DCP drive, so I would think that this would still be the limiting factor if I could have a SATA interface to the drives.

The limiting factor could be the NIC. If you are using one gigabit card to feed multiple servers, that could be your problem. I would suggest a 10 gig SFP+ fiber card in your computer, connected to a switch on the media LAN that has an SFP+ port. That will enable you to feed up to 10 servers at a gigabit each, assuming that your motherboard and SATA interface can support that bandwidth.

Also, I would suggest a genuine Linux-based OS (e.g. Ubuntu or CentOS, for which there are many FTP server options), rather than Windows and an add-on ext2/3 reader. A Linux-based OS can read these filesystems natively, thereby taking a potential failure point out of the system.

[Marcel Birgelen]

If you don't want to invest into 10GE, but you do have a GOOD managed switch and some proper NICs (like Intel NICs) in the machine, an alternative could be using LACP and bonding multiple NICs together. If you're using decent hardware, this works pretty well on Linux and also on FreeBSD (used by software like FreeNAS). If you're using Windows, don't try to bother with it. Bonded interfaces have been a connectivity nightmare over the past decade...

[Carsten Kurz]

Some NAS/NAS adapters allow to connect and share drives, and they support the common ext2/ext3 filesystem of distribution drives.

You are talking about 'a couple of CRU slots' though - why do you need many? The moment you use more than one at the same time, your network ingest speed will drop considerably.

Which type of servers do you use, and how many?

Some NAS also offers functions to automatically copy (any) content from external drives onto their internal RAID. From there, you could ingest it to many servers, and you would also have the content stored for later.

The USB2-CRU Bays also offer a SATA port, and most PCs can easily be equipped with an eSATA slot.

In general, you should be able to share an ingest drive through a typical windows computer just as well. Those ext2/3 drivers for windows however are known to be quirky and slow, so you might be better off with a minimal Linux setup. The necessity to mount a drive before it can be shared may go away once the drive is connected through SATA, as that is usually considered a non-removable drive. However, you may need to reboot the system if you want to connect a different CRU drive. With an explicit eSATA port, that may work better, some ports can be set between SATA and eSATA in the BIOS.

Maybe you should get someone in with a decent Linux knowledge.

If you don't want to copy content onto a local computer drive to be shared from there - what it your primary reason to use network transfers?

- Carsten

[Leo Enticknap]

You can get NICs with multiple Ethernet ports on them for the scenario that Marcel describes - for example, this one has four, meaning that if you LAG-ed them, you'd have a 4 GBPS uplink out of the computer. You'd need a managed switch that can support the LAG at that end, though.

SFP+ 10 gig fiber cards are not horrifically expensive, and generic, no name transceivers that in my experience work perfectly well (e.g. FS) can be had for around $30. What does cost serious money is a decent network switch with 10 gig SFP+ capability: this is about the cheapest one with a reasonable switching capacity that I know of.