recommended setup for a television station
 

I work at a local community television station.
I wondered what kind of setup and hardware would be needed to (1) store programs in a lossless format, (2) what software could be used to play scheduled episodes and (3) how would you schedule broadcast times, configure the unit, and so on. But in a way that you don't even need to know what linux is?
Upload via SFTP, configure from the web?

Your system is quite demanding, at least in the storage sector. I can say that broadcast quality uncompressed video runs at a very high bit-rate (about 235Mbps, or 105.8G/hr). That's like a DVD-drive running at 24X. Because the amount of data and its rate is enormous, I would recommend some kind of compression, even if it's mild, say 3:1. The DV encoder on digital camcorders take it down to 5:1, with decent quality.

Anyway I'd definitely go with a large RAID (at least 5 HDDs, 200gb min). Use SCSI HDDs if u can afford, otherwise use SATA. If there's a lot of programs to store, consider getting multiple servers. You'll be able to distribute the storage and load across them.

From this point on, I'm not sure if this would be suitable.

Have at least a gig of RAM and a fast (well standard now) 3GHz+ processor. You certainly need something that plays videos fast and smooth. Gigabit ethernet might also help.

And to your scheduling, would cron jobs help ??? If there's multiple servers, then a single "configuration server" should control the others.

Also how are you going to output the video? Through a TV-out port? DVI? Or a special broadcast connection?

EDIT: On second thoughts, a 3GHz processor isn't really needed. 1.5GHz+ would be more reasonable. However, if high-definition video is involved then you will need much higher specs.

well, currently we run programs by burning them to DVD's than scheduling the times that the video output is connected to each player.

I am not to sure what the output is, i'll check that. (maybe DVI is supported, but i think it is some weird form of coaxial cable)

overall, hardware would cost ...?

Are talking about becoming the head end of a broadband cable tranmission?

Right now it sounds like you are transmitting using the lowest cost method available.

If you really want to stream the content from a server then you should download real producer
from Real.com

Real has all of the specs you are looking for hardware and software for this kind of project.

Just so you know most Coaxial cable transmits around 10MBs, so I don't think you would need to
rewire your studio to transmit the content to your viewers.

Talk to the cable company about what you want to do; they can give you better advice because you
would be transmitting signals on their network.

Good Luck

Thorn

How much would hardware cost for such a project?

I hear that linux has native software RAID capabilities, how would I implement this?