VBrick Systems VOD-W Server VBrick v4.2.1 - Manual (Page 47)

VOD-W Admin Guide 39
Chapter 5
Ingesting Content
Topics in this chapter
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Content Ingestion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Overview
VBrick strongly recommends that you use the EtherneTV Portal Server exclusively to ingest all
VOD-W content. With the ETV Portal Server you can add individual files or you can FTP or
copy pre-recorded content to the ETV Portal Server for easy ingestion to the VOD-W
server. The ETV server periodically (every 5 minutes) polls certain folders for presence of
content and if found ingests the content onto multiple VOD-W servers. This process is
called Automatic Content Ingestion or Auto-ingestion. The content is placed in a pre-defined
subfolder under the FTP root folder. This pre-defined folder is called the auto-ingest root
folder. Content can also be added by using the
Add Video
function in ETV Portal Server or
by recording a live stream.
Video content added to a VOD-W server goes through a transformation process known as
ingestion. This process takes the original source MPEG video file and generates additional
"trick" files which are used for indexing, fast forward, and rewind. These files are managed by
an internal SQL database on the VOD-W which is used to keep track of all the trick files
associated with a single piece of video content. This chapter describes the process of
ingestion and its impact on data storage, content backup and recovery.
Ingestion Considerations
• Extra space in the server file system is required during ingestion. The space required is
approximately three times the size of the file being ingested. Make sure you have enough
free space available before performing an ingestion.
• You should also understand that ingestion time is a function of (1) the configured
ingestion rate and (2) the file size (or file duration and bit rate).
• The maximum number of simultaneous ingestions on the ETV Portal Server is two. If
the number of attempted ingestions exceeds two, they will be queued up.
• All content titles must begin with a forward slash (/) and apostrophes are not allowed.
Content Ingestion
Before the ingestion process begins, the video content must physically reside on the VOD-W
server. In most cases, this file transfer is handled automatically by the EtherneTV Portal
Server. In a typical scenario, after recording a piece of video content, the ETV Portal Server
automatically FTPs the video to a temporary staging area on the VOD-W and launches the
ingestion process. Ingestion is a software process that runs in the background on the VOD-