Recommended NAS for Deluxe eCinema transfers?

[James Gardiner]

Its not possible to use the disk in the Deluxe box as a storage area, as it does not have control of it. (DCPs can disappear without notice)
Catcher is designed to have its own storage, so Cinemas can have 10, 20, or more TB in it. It then ingests content from any Deluxe/Qube, whatever boxes are in your cinema and gives you a long term LMS (Library management system) of DCP. It will simply auto ingest any DCP it sees on a provider's box and store them until it's the oldest file and automatically deletes it (Tho you can mark a file as no-delete.). Good if you occasionally bring an old film back and don’t have to re-pay an MG to get a copy.

I did write a tool that scanned ftp directories and made a database of where all CPLs were ingested. Scanned once per day, walked the tree on SMSs and any other LMS type device, you could then search for the existence of a specific CPL on all devices it scanned. Technically, you could then use this as a wider database of stored CPLs. But I didn't think this tool was that useful to cinema owners. Its more an enterprise feature. For example, you need to manage content and where it is, make sure its deleted for security reasons etc. (Big post house or studio type need)

[Ryan Gallagher]

I’ve not used Ecinema distribution, but I suppose one could configure the NAS with two volumes, one for dedicated deluxe delivery, and one as the storage pool that cannot be remotely nuked by deluxe (which cinema catcher could utilize).

But I kinda had the impression deluxe required hardware, and was not just a software solution?

If cinema catcher was not in use I’d be considering tools like cron, rsync, and ftp to facilitate the desired pool storage and auto ingests. One has to be careful though about how partially transferred files are handled. I know our doremi would break SimpleDCP’s sync process if it tried to ftp ingest a DCP before all the downloading from offsite was complete. We had to poke them to resync that title if this occurred.

[Sebastian Binz]

Thanks James, got it.
In my case the Deluxe box is a Synology NAS with tons of storage, so it does not make sense for me to have another large storage on the Ubuntu box on which the catcher app is curently running.
If I would mount a folder on the NAS from the catcher box, I would probably end up having catcher ingest the file via FTP from the NAS, just to put it back onto the shared directory on the NAS - which sound like not really making sense.

Picking up on Ryan's idea:
Would it be possible to run catcher within a docker container on the synology NAS?

The deluxe tool (its actually called Sharc by CinePostProducution here in Europe, working in a similar fashion) would be downloading DCPs into /download on the NAS and then catcher would ingest from that location into a folder on the same NAS (e.g. /catcher/storage). From there one could then initiate the ingest into the ICMP.

Would this work? I would probably need to fiddle around with the FTP config in order to avoid the two FTP servers created by synology and catcher getting into a conflict.


Coming to your last idea: I would think that there is indeed a certain need for such a tool scanning remote locations and handling the ingest to a cinema server. At least here in Germany there are at least 3 different companies running eDelivery solutions. Some provide their own hardware (GoFilex), some run as a software on a Windows PC or a Synology NAS (SHARC) so you will evenutally end up in a situation where there is more than one box with a large storage attached accessible via FTP. In that scenario it makes sense to have someone like catcher to act like a man in the middle and tell the ICMP to ingest the DCP directly from any of these FTP sources, rather than ingesting it into a storage controlled by catcher and having a second ingest job into the ICMP.

[James Gardiner]

From my experience.. Having GoFlix (Deluxe), Qube, Sharc, Startrek (4 vendors).
GoFlix have a small Dell mini desktop. They delete things very quickly. This is a problem as its the main supplier here so you need to move it of if you plan to keep it around.
Qube, small Dell mini PC, delete only when needed.
Sharc (nas based) tend to leave things around for a long time. Probably until the disk gets full.

They all offer software but force typical cinemas to install a dedicated Internet connection and a hardware box. Only if you're a non-commercial site do they allow PC based tools.

I have asked numerous times why they force sites to install multiple internet links, run dedicated (eats more power) hardware. Adding extra links to a site is a pain as locations are not always wired up to do it, can cost thousands to rectify.

My preference would be docker containers. Then I could run, with my TMS, on a server running ProxMox, as many systems I need. One for TMS, POS server, one for each delivery service. Far more reliable. Utilise our own corporate link that we could upgrade to 1Gbe. Much faster, much cheaper to run, much more reliable. But for reasons they will not say, they will not allow it.
But I do believe it will eventually happen/go-virtual as its likely for reasons the cinema owners will not linked as.. Why would they keep it secret. Plus cinema owners will get sick extra costs.
My worry is they could do secret audits of the players, like in the VPF days. Nothing stopping them. The devices have the access to do that as they can talk to the Players directly.

catcher does run as docker compose system, but I am not sure it would run well under a gutless NAS cpu. catcher does a lot more then this simple LMS feature. Its AutoKDM toolset is very useful as it has good diagnostic tools to allow faster follow up on why KDMs may not be working as expected.

I was also wondering. My main service portal I am every always improving, uses much of the same code, It converts all incoming TLR/ADV into mp4 so you can view them via the browser. I could add that to catcher at some point. Plus add the Leq(m) measurement system so you can QC the audio levels via the browser.

Currently, I am spending all my time converting the main portal from older angularjs to svelte modern javascript front end framework. Makes it a lot faster to use, especially when dealing with large tables of data as it only downloads the visible data and not the full tables. Which get amazingly larger than I ever expected. for example, SO many KDMs. loading the KDM table in AutoKDM is far to slow when its at typical use levels.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Having looked more at what all catcher does, I would agree relying on the synology cpu is not ideal. As James suggests a dedicated “server” or vm is better.

But if you are willing to accept some file handling performance hit, and have the network to support it, pointing catcher at a networked share or network block device for its storage folder seems doable? So if the existing NAS is large enough it could perhaps be used in that role too, just not the application host?

If so, segregating Deluxe and Catcher's storage volumes or quotas might be advisable... so that one does not over-utilize the resource and squeeze the other?

[James Gardiner]

The catcher always keeps enough Space available to store a DCP, so a few hundred gig (Configurable). And yes, I run a test catcher with the storage directory mounting from my large TrueNAS storage array. Works well enough, especially if you have 10Gbe (Obviously I do, its cheap now.) If you change the size of the share. Would likely just delete files until it was in the limit or grow until it hits the limit.

If I was going to do it cheap, I would get something like...
Dell OptiPlex 7080 SFF i5 10500 3.1GHz 8GB 256GB for refurbished, about $300 usd. drop in a 10Gbe hard disk, or connect to a NAS. Possibly drop in a half height 10Gbe card.
16gig would be better though. Doing a lot of Disk IO works better with more memory.

The biggest issue is,, you need to be comfortable with Linux administration in setting it all up. (Mounting a storage drive, etc.. Editing setup files for catcher) It's not windows point and click. But really, you don't want it to be, as you tend to get these systems remotely administered. And command line rules. For example, why ACE was converted to Linux based. AAM, Linux based. All the better TMS or player are Linux based.