Eating Our Dog Food

There is an old expression in development that developers need to eat their own dog food. Basically, it means that people who develop software should have to use that software without any special access the same way a user would use it. I've been doing that this week as I've been ingesting several TED Talks from the TED conferences. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Unfortunately, they are distributed as MPEG4 with H.264. This is a great codec, but our current transcoder can't process these so I have to download these 70-150MB files, re-encode them as QuickTimes with DVPRO compression and then move the new 3-4GB file to the ingest folder. When I move these much larger videos from my working space on the XServer to the ingest folder, the file moves through 5 different systems:

1. From the XRaid connected to the XServer via a fibre channel connection
2. From the XServer to the edit station I'm working at via AFP (Apple File Protocol) over a dedicated gigabit ethernet
3. From edit station to the DOMS1 server over shared gigabit network connection using SMB
4. From DOMS1 to another RAID via a fibre channel channel connection

So not only do I waste time increasing the size of a file that will never look any better, I have to move this file between several computers before the ingest process even starts. Once the ingest process starts, I have to re-enter the metadata for each video.

The revised version of the Open Media System will improve this process by being able to handle video that has been compressed with common codecs like H.264, moving files directly from working space to the transcoder, and remembering the metadata information entered for the project and setting that as the default for each video.