Large-Scale Video Archiving?

BondHeadGuy asks: "Ok, say you have 1000+ cameras emitting 30 frames/second worth of 640x480 grayscale video...and you have to store it indefinitely. What do you do? This is a real question, believe it or not. 30 frames/s * 300 KB/frame = 9 MB/s per camera. 100:1 video compression brings that down to ~90 KB/s. But 90 KB/s * 1000 cameras = 90 MB/s, or ~8 terabytes/day. Retrieval, though, can be essentially arbitrarily slow. Reliability should be good enough to not be annoying long term. Is there a solution that: has 8 TB/day storage capacity, can handle the 90 MB/s write speed, and lets you save some bucks on the (slow) read side?"

Comments

compression!!

[krog]

surely a 640x480 greyscale image can be reduced to well under 300kB per frame. PNG (or GIF for those patent-violating whores) would do a fine job of reducing individual frames if you want lossless compression, but you probably don't. DIVX or MPEG or any number of video codecs would give you *awesome* compression, especially if the scene doesn't change.

this seems obvious to me. why is this even a question?

No problem.

[Russ Nelson]

No problem. Just broadcast the video streams into outer space on 1,000 different channels of TV. When you want to fetch that video, just go the appropriate number of light years away from earth and start watching.
-russ