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Could I Run a TV Station on Linux?
JesusQuintana asks: "I'm working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they're using tape and I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won't sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. (They won't let us buy our own storage.) We have the expertise to build our own infrastructure (NAS, redundancy, etc.), but really just need the equivalent of iTunes for high quality video. There are lots of other pieces needed to complete the work-flow (such as encoding the media), which could be accomplished on Mac or Windows or even Linux. But what about playback? We need something that will play back these files at their scheduled times (perhaps scheduling cron jobs to change playlists) to broadcast quality hardware (SDI or YUV video). Could we run a TV station on Linux?"
...it appears to me that BBC America is probably run by two people and an automated system. My reasoning for this? The glitches I see from time to time. Sometimes the schedule on their web site will say they are showing a certain program, when they are showing something else. Sometimes I've even seen things like a program go to commercial break and when the break is over, you're in the middle of a different program. I suspect these are automation glitches. My second reason for saying this is that I have a series of BBC America station IDs I've edited out of the regular program streams and I have an automated playlist system that can simulate a live BBC America feed just with the programs I've recorded and commercials I've produced myself. So the answer is: yes you can. The real question is, how much of your time do you want to dedicate to doing it and are you up to the challenge. I did it purely for the fun of running a virtual TV station. Would I trust it to work for a low-power TV station? Sure. But I think you'd definitely want better hardware than what I've got. Just make sure it's supported in Linux, or else it's a show stopper. (No pun intended)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Speaking of VLC, I know a guy at the cable co where I used to work who uses VLC running on $800 Dell servers with capture cards to digitize analog channels to a format that the digital boxes can read. He saved the company $9000/channel for each of the channels they didn't have already piped to them in digital format (the lowest cost purpose built digitizer was $10,000)