There are six coop members, taking up around 10GB of disk space, leaving 50GB of free space at this point in time. I think it was the majority of coop members’ intention to host their photo and movie libraries when they first signed up. That didn’t completely materialize.
James mentioned that it takes far too long to upload his library. The typical ADSL broadband can sustain around 50KB/s upload. So it would take close to six hours to upload a library of 1GB. No big deal for me, where I just copy the stuff to my home server and upload it from there, but I suppose most folks don’t leave their computers on all the time.
When I put together mother, I spent a little bit more for a DVD reader instead of a CD-ROM reader, so that folks could burn their gigabytes of data onto a DVD and bring it in. Now that I think about it, there is nothing stopping us from sending a DVD to Telehouse by post, and then call the SysOps and ask them nicely to stick the DVD into the DVD reader of mother. As they say, do not underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes.
Unfortunately, due to poor design of the case, the DVD reader of mother is not plugged in. I wanted the two HDs to be on different IDE channels, and it just isn’t possible to connect the DVD reader to any one of the two IDE chains. Bummer.
Maybe I’ll get a SATA-PATA adaptor or a USB2-PATA adaptor to get the DVD reader to hook up to mother. If there is such a demand.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Toby // May 26, 2005 at 6:41 pm
Can mother stream serving the video clips? If not, I don’t see any point to use it as an archive for videos.
For photos, fotop.net charged $99 / year for a 30GB storage (it was unlimited before). Why bother?
2 tin_the_fatty // May 26, 2005 at 9:58 pm
On-demand streaming (aka progressive downloading) is a feature of the particular file format. You just made the media file, put it onto the server, and control the browser plugin w/ some HTML. No special server-side software is necessary.
Live streaming OTOH needs special server-side software. Three bigs ones: Quicktime/Darwin Streaming Server, Real Helix and Windows Media Server (in order of popularity of client software installed). QT/D SS is Free software, while the other two are kinda expensive. None of the coop members have the need for this service. Our 600KB/s bandwidth is also kinda limiting for serving live streaming to any sizable audience.
I totally agree with you that fotop.net and flickr.com (which I like) are excellent for sharing photos. Had I not have our server I’d probably go for flickr.com myself. Perfectly adequate for photo sharing.
The coop server does a lot more than storing and serving media files. It has been going for nearly two years now, and we have only so far lost one member (well not quite, he donated the first server machine but didn’t use our service, so we waived his subscriptions), so I would like to think that the coop members are getting reasonable value for money.
3 Toby // May 26, 2005 at 10:45 pm
What’s the URL of your photo gallery?