Hi Ken et alia, Sounds like a very cool project so I thought I'd add in my two cents. I haven't done anything quite like this (the night is best spent sleeping as far as I'm concerned :) ), but i've got a few ideas that I've picked up elsewhere. Firstly, I heartily believe that Linux is the best choice for this job by a long way. For example, a few weeks back my friends and I put in a team to the 48 hours film competition. I provided one of my machines for capturing dv footage from the cameras. We ran the box all through the night, thrashing the discs due to simultaneous capture and editing. The box coped fine and we only dropped eight frames over a pile of dv tapes. The previous year they were using a windows box and dropped about 3000 frames over fewer tapes. The moral of this story is that windows boxes are not well suited to operation at high load for long periods of time. In comparision linux boxes will likely cope with a bigger load over a longer period of time and are extremely unlikely to crash - if it works once it will continue to do so. Also, it seems to me that on the same hardware Linux, if properly set up, has much higher disk read and write speeds than Windows. Hey do you want to play multiple dvds at once (maybe on different monitors) ? You could do this too. In this case disk read speed would be the most important factor to avoid frame dropping. Here's what I'd set up to do this: I'd use a (fairly) recent box. For playing back a single dvd per machine anything from the last four or five years should do it fine - if you wanted to be able to play high definition stuff you're going to need something a little more powerful though. Personally I'd use an nvidia graphics card, but it wouldn't have to be anything fancy. The linux drivers for these are very good. For the disks, I think external attatchment would be best, using firewire (you'd already need a couple of hundred gigs storage, yes?) That way you could just add a new disc without stopping the system, and there is no practical limit to the number you can add. I've recently discovered software raid in linux and already I'm finding it useful - it is faster than the cheaper hardware cards, and the configuration is able to be migrated between computers. Because the files are likely to be mostly very large (a gig or too each, right?) I would use a non-default filesystem blocksize and, if you went for raid, a big raid stripe size. Personally I'd put one inode every four megs and maybe have a 128k stripe size. This is what I use for my server that stores video footage (but mine is dv, not dvd) and lots of dvd .iso images. These parameters have a very big effect on read and write speed. (like a 30% speed increase) On the software side, personally I'd use gentoo. I tried it once and now I've put it on all my computers, slow and fast. The performance gain is well worthwhile, and the new livecd install process is not painful. There are many good alternatives you could use to play the videos and load new ones, these have been mentioned in the other emails to the list. I would go for mplayer for playing, due to the high performance, stability, and support for almost all formats. I like to stick on the command line when ripping dvds, if you are using the machine for other things like playing dvds at the same time this would save resources. You could write a shell script to automate this. For control, shell scripts and the cron daemon would be my tools of choice. Depending on your budjet, this system could play and rip dvds as quick as you like. I read today that a bunch of people with a NUMA system, 32-way with powerpc processors can now compile the six million lines of kernel code in under five seconds. So the sky really is the limit. I'd like to hear how you get on with this project - hope my post is at least slightly helpful :) Good luck, Tim >Hi All > >I have been given the opportunity to set up a computer to play movies on an >(almost) continuous basis. Naturally I would like to use a Linux system. > >Briefly the requirements are: > To automatically start at midday and finish at 12:30am the next day, but >this needs to be different on one day of the week. > To accept loading of movies from DVD, VCD onto the hard drive. We >currently have about 60 titles and keep adding to the selection. > Preferably to randomly select the next movie from those available. If not >it needs to restart the next day from either the current movie (current >point or at the begining is no problem) or the next movie. But NOT to start >at the beginning of the list each day. > Provide an operator the facility to skip to the next movie. > >We are looking for a system that is basically low work as we are currently >having to manually change movies at the end of each one at the moment. > >I am looking for info about: > what program is best to play the movies > What program is best to load the movies to the hdd > What program is best to control the system > Any recommendations about the video and sound hardware > >We need reasonable quality (not necessarily top quality) > >Has anyone had experience with a system like this? > >Regards >Ken Lomax > > >_______________________________________________ >AuckLUG mailing list >AuckLUG at linux.net.nz >http://www.linux.net.nz/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aucklug > >
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