I work for a public broadcaster in the Netherlands in the Internet department.
A) I don't now much about studio lighting so I wont comment on that.
B) I second the comment about the XL1's we use them, they are very good, only disadvantage we found is the location of the cable connections which cause the cables to get loose occassionely. We also use Sony PD150's these are quite solid as wel. The advantage of the XL1 over the PD150 is the shoulder-rest which makes for steadier shots.
C) Mackie's are reliable mixers, however there usability can use some improvement. For lowend audio we use Behringer stuff it is not to great in quality but it works. We are also quite happy with our Yamaha OV-1 for audiomixing. It might be more expensive but is fully digital and motorized.
4) Sony DSR-25 if you don't need the remote by RS422, DSR-45 if you do. The built in LCD takes care of yet another TV in the heap of equipment.
5) Cleaner stinks. When it works don't change *anything* on the computer or it will break again. We have found it quite unreliable in quite a number of aspects. The user-interface is very bad as well. It's click hell. We are changing over to a more expensive solution called FlipFactory by Telestream. But that will be above your budget I'm afraid. However it is utterly flexible, it can read/create close to any video compression there is. Including MPEG 4:2:2,Quicktime,Windows Media and Real, and all the 'weird' broadcast specific formats.
Ha, cheap yes, robust no, we had a lot of 'mysterious crashes' with linux boxes. Neither of which where traceable back. powerful, not in the I/0 department, do a little I/O on a Linux box and it grinds to halt.
We have our share of linux and solaris boxes. And I assure you the Solaris boxes are way more stable and robust. We invested quite a bit in Linux boxes the last years, but we are moving away from them, since they don't prove reliable. The mess that is called a linux distribution proves far to costly to maintain. Fix that first instead of adding loads of features. Sorry but Linux is going the road of Windows in the bad software sense, form before function.
I can assure that there is prior art, as I have been developing for the VPRO since 1994 and since we put our TV-Guide online since then (we are a public broadcaster). We very quickly made a system which generated the current week page by referencing a url like this: http://vpro.nl/htbin/scan/www/vpromedia/beeld/home/thisweek.src The url is static on the homepage, but refers to a different page every week. I do have a backuptape from that period, but I don't know if it is still readable.
I work for a public broadcaster that puts all its radio shows online. We have got about 30.000 audiofiles comprimising about 1 Terabyte of storage. Doubling that to 2 Terabyte would require a major investment. It is not the disks that are expensive it is the backup solution that kills you. Plus encoding all those bitrates would require more than double the capacity as well (we are talking more than 100 hour of audio a week here). Besides it is even more important in live streaming situations. It would mean you need double the bandwith to the server, that gets very expensive very quickly.
It is important to really find out if the disks are the problem. I suggest you examine your system carefully to see what is actually happening. Besides using vmstat, iostat and friends you can get a software package by Adrian Cockroft which has a 'virtual adrian' which points out all the bad spots in the system. It can be found here : SE toolkit
We ran the servers for a festival in the Netherlands at the end of may (pinkpop), which was quite popular (5 million hits on the peak day) To make sure we stayed up we built a Linux box with a P2-300 and 128 MB memory with a 10Mbit connection to the net (our provider has 100Mbit) At peak times we would be serving 150hits/sec This includes dynamic pages, we solved this by setting apache up in frontproxy mode, and letting it server the static pages from disc and the dynamic one's through the proxy mode. We used mod_rewrite's fileexists to check if we had the file otherwhise it would proxy. Any static pages that where retrieved through proxy from the 'main' server would get pushed back to the front.
We are still refining this setup as the order in which new pages/images get pushed to the front is quite significant to not overload the backend server (which is the one generating the dynamic html),it did catch about 900K hits that day though, and it is a Java webserver (written ourselves)
The conclusion is that the problem is more in how to 'staticify' dynamic pages then serving static pages as a simple P2-300 had no trouble with it (load not above 10, CPU not above 30%) even with the 'file exist/proxy' rules from mod_rewrite.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a public broadcaster in the Netherlands in the Internet department.
A) I don't now much about studio lighting so I wont comment on that.
B) I second the comment about the XL1's we use them, they are very good, only disadvantage we found is the location of the cable connections which cause the cables to get loose occassionely. We also use Sony PD150's these are quite solid as wel. The advantage of the XL1 over the PD150 is the shoulder-rest which makes for steadier shots.
C) Mackie's are reliable mixers, however there usability can use some improvement. For lowend audio we use Behringer stuff it is not to great in quality but it works. We are also quite happy with our Yamaha OV-1 for audiomixing. It might be more expensive but is fully digital and motorized.
4) Sony DSR-25 if you don't need the remote by RS422, DSR-45 if you do. The built in LCD takes care of yet another TV in the heap of equipment.
5) Cleaner stinks. When it works don't change *anything* on the computer or it will break again.
We have found it quite unreliable in quite a number of aspects. The user-interface is very bad as well. It's click hell. We are changing over to a more expensive solution called FlipFactory by Telestream. But that will be above your budget I'm afraid. However it is utterly flexible, it can read/create close to any video compression there is. Including MPEG 4:2:2,Quicktime,Windows Media and Real, and all the 'weird' broadcast specific formats.
> Linux is cheap, robust, powerful.
Ha, cheap yes, robust no, we had a lot of 'mysterious crashes' with linux boxes. Neither of which where traceable back. powerful, not in the I/0 department, do a little I/O on a Linux box and it grinds to halt.
We have our share of linux and solaris boxes. And I assure you the Solaris boxes are way more stable and robust. We invested quite a bit in Linux boxes the last years, but we are moving away from them, since they don't prove reliable. The mess that is called a linux distribution proves far to costly to maintain. Fix that first instead of adding loads of features. Sorry but
Linux is going the road of Windows in the bad software sense, form before function.
I want function before form.
I can assure that there is prior art, as I have been developing for the VPRO since 1994 and since we put our TV-Guide online since then (we are a public broadcaster). We very quickly made a system which generated the current week page by referencing a url like this: http://vpro.nl/htbin/scan/www/vpromedia/beeld/home /thisweek.src
The url is static on the homepage, but refers to a different page every week. I do have a backuptape from that period, but I don't know if it is still readable.
I work for a public broadcaster that puts all its radio shows online. We have got about 30.000 audiofiles comprimising about 1 Terabyte of storage. Doubling that to 2 Terabyte would require a major investment. It is not the disks that are expensive it is the backup solution that kills you. Plus encoding all those bitrates would require more than double the capacity as well (we are talking more than 100 hour of audio a week here). Besides it is even more important in live streaming situations. It would mean you need double the bandwith to the server, that gets very expensive very quickly.
It is important to really find out if the disks are the problem.
I suggest you examine your system carefully to see what is actually happening. Besides using vmstat, iostat and friends you can get
a software package by Adrian Cockroft which has a 'virtual adrian' which points out all the bad spots in the system.
It can be found here : SE toolkit
We ran the servers for a festival in the Netherlands at the end of may (pinkpop), which was quite popular (5 million hits on the peak day) To make sure we stayed up we built a Linux box with a P2-300 and 128 MB memory with a 10Mbit connection to the net (our provider has 100Mbit) At peak times we would be serving 150hits/sec This includes dynamic pages, we solved this by setting apache up in frontproxy mode, and letting it server the static pages from disc and the dynamic one's through the proxy mode. We used mod_rewrite's fileexists to check if we had the file otherwhise it would proxy. Any static pages that where retrieved through proxy from the 'main' server would get pushed back to the front.
We are still refining this setup as the order in which new pages/images get pushed to the front is quite significant to not overload the backend server (which is the one generating the dynamic html),it did catch about 900K hits that day though, and it is a Java webserver (written ourselves)
The conclusion is that the problem is more in how to 'staticify' dynamic pages then serving static pages as a simple P2-300 had no trouble with it (load not above 10, CPU not above 30%) even with the 'file exist/proxy' rules from mod_rewrite.