[Samba] Samba and Preallocated Files
Jeremy Allison
jra at samba.org
Tue Mar 15 18:00:01 GMT 2005
On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 06:31:19AM -0500, AndyLiebman at aol.com wrote:
> A question about capturing videos to a Samba share...
>
> When Apple's Final Cut Pro captures video files, it pre-allocates file space
> on the destination volume.
>
> If you capture to a local volume that's physically attached to a Macintosh,
> or if you capture to a network volume via AFP (Apple File Sharing Protocol),
> you can see that Final Cut instantly creates a file of the anticipated size
> on the destination volume at the moment just before capture begins (the
> anticipated size is based on the maximum capture time limit set by a user).
>
> However, when capturing videos to a Windows or Samba share, Final Cut
> actually will write out "dummy data" to a file, and then presumably it replaces the
> dummy data with real data as the capture moves along.
>
> Effectively, this makes Samba and Windows shares useless for capturing Final
> Cut videos. Because, for instance, if you expect to capture a 20-minute DV
> clip, it will take approximately 10 minutes to create the pre-allocated file
> before capturing even begins -- even when you are connecting via a dedicated
> Gigabit Ethernet link. The process seems to chug along unbelievably slowly.
> And if you were capturing uncompressed video (which has about 5x the data rate
> of DV video) well, the wait would be interminable.
>
> Can anybody on this list see a way to allow Final Cut to instantly create
> that pre allocated file space that it wants to create on a Samba share? Are
> their any Samba settings that could make this possible? It would be a coup for
> Samba!
>
> BTW, Apple's IMovie doesn't go through this pre allocation business. But,
> alas, IMovie doesn't capture timecode data, so Final Cut users who want to work
> with Samba shares can't simply switch to IMovie for capturing their videos.
That's a Mac client issue. We do support "sparse" pre-allocation on the
server side. I'd raise it as a bug with Apple.
Jeremy.
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