Speaker
Michal Kwiatek
(CERN)
Description
The digitalization of CERN audio-visual archives, a major task currently in
progress, will generate over 40 TB of video, audio and photo files. Storing
these files is one issue, but a far more important challenge is to provide long-
time coherence of the archive and to make these files available on line with
minimum manpower investment.
An infrastructure, based on standard CERN services, has been implemented
whereby master files, stored in the CERN Distributed File System (DFS), are
discovered and scheduled for encoding into lightweight web formats based on
predefined profiles. Changes in master files, conversion profiles or in the
metadata database (read from CDS, the CERN Document Server) are
automatically detected and the media re-encoded whenever necessary. The
encoding processes are run on virtual servers provided on-demand by the
CERN Server Self Service Center, so that new servers can be easily configured
to adapt to higher load. Finally, the generated files are made available from the
CERN standard web servers with streaming implemented using Windows Media
Services.
This paper describes the architecture in detail and analyses its advantages and
limitations.
Author
Michal Kwiatek
(CERN)
