Paul,
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Grotevant, Paul F <p...@utexas.edu> wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> We are currently exploring architecture options for storing and serving up
> streaming video from our Fedora Commons repository. We run our own Wowza
> streaming server, and the option to require authentication for viewing the
> streamed video is a requirement.
>
> - How to avoid duplication of storage? Ideally, we would like to store the
> video files as managed data streams in Fedora and feed those to the Wowza
> server, rather than storing separate copies for Fedora and Wowza. One
> option for this would be to use Wowza's API to consume the video directly
> from a Fedora URL. Has anyone ever experimented with this? Thoughts on
> co-locating Fedora and Wowza in the same Tomcat container or at least on
> the same hardware, to reduce the network latency issue?
>
>
I can speak to this above question because we're using Fedora with Wowza.
I use external datastreams and have all our video files available via http
with Apache as well as NFS.
Video files reside on server, attached to a SAN, that's running our HSM
software. Large preservation video files are moved off to tape and can be
recalled manually, and access-level video files (H264) stay on disk. This
server then shares all these files via a NFS share.
The NFS share can then be mounted by a Wowza server to stream the videos
directly, and can also be mounted by another server which serves out the
files via Apache to Fedora. When ingesting new video, the files are
written to the NFS share and then add to the Fedora by means of an external
datastream that points to the files via HTTP. What makes it all tick is a
logical construction of file names and folders. This is accomplished in
part by using the BagIt strategy where digital content has a prescribed
structure on your filesystem. The rest is building your NFS shares and
Apache directories coherently and configuring your applications to use the
correct paths and follow your naming conventions.
The advantage to this is I don't have to monkey with Wowza at all, or write
any special disseminators in Fedora... neither of which I really know how
to do anyway, so this all plays to my particular technical strengths. If
you want to use managed datastreams, you certainly should be able to get
something working that enables Wowza to grab the video from fedora and
stream it out. I can't say how exactly how you would do that, but I'm sure
it's possible. However, the one technical limitation you may run up
against is storing large video files as managed datastreams. There as been
a thread going on about this recently and the general consensus it seems is
that you should be okay with files in the 1-2 GB range, but 10 or more and
you run into problems. I have video files in the 100's of GB, so I had to
use external datastreams and built the technical structure I have now based
on that requirement.
I would note that if you can use managed datastreams, I would, but you'd
need to investigate the Wowza integration issue and datastream size issue
first. I'm sure there are other folks here that could speak more directly
to that.
...adam
____________________________________________
Adam Wead
Systems and Digital Collections Librarian
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
216.515.1960 (t)
215.515.1964 (f)
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