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BBC Redux was a
BBC Research & Development
BBC Research & Development is the technical research department of the BBC.
Function
It has responsibility for researching and developing advanced and emerging media technologies for the benefit of the corporation, and wider UK and European ...
system that digitally recorded
produced by the
British Broadcasting Corporation #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
.
It operated from 2007 to 2022
and contains several
petabyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s of recordings
and subtitle data.
It is notable for being the
proof of concept
Proof of concept (POC or PoC), also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has prac ...
for the
Flash video
Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ar ...
streaming version of the
BBC iPlayer
BBC iPlayer (stylised as iPLAYER or BBC iPLAYER) is a video on demand service from the BBC. The service is available on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets, personal computers and smart televisions. iPlayer services del ...
.
It is an internal research project developed for testing
which acts as a giant
video on demand
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...
or
personal video recorder
A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to d ...
(PVR).
It contains a complete digital archive, recording both television and radio twenty-four hours a day, of all of the BBC's national and also some regional broadcast output since mid-2007,
and is automatically compiled without human input.
The BBC stated that BBC Redux is one of its major contributions to the field of digital archiving and preservation.
Some accounts for accessing the system on a temporary basis were made available at Mashed 08
and again at Culture Hack Day 2011, providing streaming-only access to BBC content broadcast during the weekend of the event. As well as streaming, the system enables high-quality downloads of television and radio content,
and has had the option to download subtitles from programmes since 2008.
BBC Redux had originally been developed at the BBC's Kingswood Warren campus,
in only two months,
and with the investment required being significantly less than the iPlayer.
The saved content can be used for
broadcast compliance checking and by BBC programme researchers.
, BBC Redux is only available to employees, because existing legal contracts with content producers limit how material can be broadcast, distributed and made available to general consumers.
The
Readme
In software development, a README file contains information about the other files in a directory or archive of computer software. A form of documentation, it is usually a simple plain text file called README, Read Me, READ.ME, README.TXT, R ...
file for associated API frameworks hosted on
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...
states:
In May 2022, in a blog post, the BBC confirmed the sunset and ultimate closure of the Redux service. Redux content was migrated to the new BBC Archive Search, which operates on Amazon Web Services. New programmes are delivered to the BBC Archive automatically as they are ingested for playout.
Technical details
The system records over 100 megabits per second, continuously.
, BBC Redux contained 300,000 hours of recorded audio and video.
A series of standard Digital Video Broadcasting terrestrial antennas and satellite dishes, coupled to
DVB-T
DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Feb ...
and
DVB-S
Digital Video Broadcasting – Satellite (DVB-S) is the original DVB standard for Satellite Television and dates from 1995, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997. The first commercial applications was by Star TV in Asia ...
TV tuner card
A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk much like the digital v ...
s are used to capture the incoming
DVB multiplexes transmitted for over-the-air
Freesat
Freesat is a British free-to-air satellite television service, first formed as a joint venture between the BBC and ITV plc and now owned by Digital UK. The service was formed as a memorandum in 2007 and has been marketed since 6 May 2008. Free ...
and
Freeview Freeview may refer to:
*Freeview (Australia), the marketing name for the digital terrestrial television platform in Australia
*Freeview (New Zealand), a digital satellite and digital terrestrial television platform in New Zealand
*Freeview (UK), a ...
terrestrial television
Terrestrial television or over-the-air television (OTA) is a type of television broadcasting in which the signal transmission occurs via radio waves from the terrestrial (Earth-based) transmitter of a TV station to a TV receiver having an ante ...
.
These raw
MPEG transport stream
MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS, MTS) or simply transport stream (TS) is a standard digital container format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) data. It is used in broadcast syste ...
s are split into
single-programme MPEG transport streams, encapsulated in
RTP, and sent using
UDP IP multicast
IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is the IP-specific form of multicast and is used for streaming media and other network applications. It uses speci ...
within the IPv4
multicast address
A multicast address is a logical identifier for a group of hosts in a computer network that are available to process datagrams or frames intended to be multicast for a designated network service. Multicast addressing can be used in the link l ...
range
233.122.227.0/24 from
AS31459.
From the multicast streams individual
television programme
A television show – or simply TV show – is any content produced for viewing on a television set which can be broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, or cable, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed bet ...
s can be extracted and saved, without requiring any transcoding or conversion of the contained
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...
video data.
, racks of
Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 machines were used acquiring and storing the incoming programmes respectively; while commodity
x86-64
x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...
computers were used for database operations and playback transcoding.
The T2000 storage nodes are connected by
10 Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlike previous ...
on the network side,
and then by
serial attached SCSI to
RAID
Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to:
Attack
* Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground
* Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business
* Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
boxes containing high-capacity
commodity
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
The price of a co ...
Serial ATA
SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host adapter, host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) ...
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...
s.
The "
fsck
The system utility fsck (''file system consistency check'') is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. A similar command, CHKDSK, exists in Microsoft Windows ...
-free"
ZFS file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
is used after experiments with
Unix File System
The Unix file system (UFS) is a family of file systems supported by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is a distant descendant of the original filesystem used by Version 7 Unix.
Design
A UFS volume is composed of the following ...
(UFS) proved it to be too slow.
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
had to manually repair the filesystems on two occasions using
Unix dd.
The software is based on
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...
technologies,
[;]
and uses a combination of
mod_perl
Mod, MOD or mods may refer to:
Places
* Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band
* M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US ...
and
C running on
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around t ...
.
A series of "
lolcat
A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.
Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laug ...
" images are used for the system's
HTTP 404
In computer network communications, the HTTP 404, 404 not found, 404, 404 error, page not found or file not found error message is a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) standard response code, to indicate that the browser was able to commun ...
and error pages.
Projects
As part of the European Union (EU) "NoTube" project running between 2009–12, a recommendation research system using
Lonclass
The BBC's Lonclass ("London Classification") is a subject classification system used internally at the BBC throughout its BBC Archives, archives.
Lonclass is derived from the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), itself a reworking of the earli ...
categorisation and
Tanimoto coefficient matching was tested by the BBC R&D Audience Experience team and integrated with 23,000 recordings delivered from Redux.
The matching dataset was gathered over a period of five months.
For a BBC Digital Media Initiative (DMI) demonstration entitled "Million Minutes", files from the BBC's
D-3 video tape archive were imported into the Redux system during 2009–2010.
This also used commercial software from
Artesia Digital Media Group and involved creating a
representational state transfer (REST) interface onto the content stored within Redux.
During 2010,
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an impor ...
and
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...
browser extension
A browser extension is a small software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styling of web ...
s were developed to integrate Redux content with the mai
www.bbc.co.uk/programmesdirectory.
In January 2012, the BBC's Multimedia Classification team announced they were hoping to test and add "mood-based navigation" to the existing BBC Redux interface,
along with
audience measurement
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometim ...
and other rich
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
comprising work part-funded by the
Technology Strategy Board
Innovate UK is the United Kingdom's innovation agency, which provides money and support to organisations to make new products and services. It is a non-departmental public body operating at arm's length from the Government as part of the United ...
.
During 2010–2011 BBC Research and Development integrated content archived in BBC Redux with the BBC's existing internal BBC
InFax
The BBC Programme Catalogue is an online archive of the entire BBC back Library catalog, catalogue of TV and radio programmes. The catalogue is for internal use by the BBC although for a time a beta online version was available to the public. The ...
system, allowing finding of metadata and archive content within the same browser window,
covering news and
subtitles
Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of the screen in films, television programs, video games or other visual media. They can be transcriptions of the screenplay, translations of it, or informa ...
from over the previous five years.
During March 2012, the Atlas index changed the method of equivalence matching used for indexing against BBC Redux.
References
External links
*
{{BBC
Redux
2007 establishments in the United Kingdom
Film archives in the United Kingdom
Video on demand services