BBC moves Linux into TV production

The new system was first used for the show Dragon's Den and then for a Foo Fighters music video which needed a fast turn-around for digital TV and Web TV.

Next was television soap opera EastEnders which has strict storage protocols, mostly done with tapes.

"We provided a NAS server running with 10TB of storage which is a no-name brand PC running Linux and Samba," Cunningham said. "I couldn't encourage them to drop tape all together and use our system so they are still using tape."

"Now we have proven it works, productions are going to rely on it and the next version will have RAID-5. We've thought about complete redundancy and that would double the cost, but we are already much cheaper than the alternatives."

After the initial prototype in 2005, BBC is now in trial stage so productions "willing to have a few extra bits of kit lying around the studio" are using files instead of tape.

"Tape is still useful for backup so the next stage of production will expect to use our system for online and offline [storage] and only use tape when something goes wrong," Cunningham said.

Ingex is high-definition ready and has been tested and can use the same hardware to do two digital streams which no commercial hardware can do.

All of the source code is available at ingex.sourceforge.net.

Cunningham said BBC has been involved in open source, particularly standardization, "for a while" and where it benefits the industry "it is quite straight forward to release it".

BBC's next challenge will be to migrate its massive archive of a million tapes to the LTO format and then eventually to disk where appropriate.