vcs for hefty video and graphics files

[Mike Meyer]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:32:55 +0100
Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:

> On 2010-11-22, at 19:09 , Harry Putnam wrote:
> The truth is, most open-source developers are that: developers. They don't deal with binary files that much, let alone with huge purely binary projects. This means you'll only find true love in proprietary stuff. From what I know, most of the A/V versioning tends to use tools close to the video gaming industry, and that's generally Perforce or tools built on/around Perforce.
> 
> If you're a "lightweight semi-pro", p4's $740/year license (per user, but I assume you'd be the only user of the system) might not be seen as a good investment for now, so I'd suggest starting with svn.

The perforce free evaluation (though they say on the download page you
can use it for as long and for any purpose you like) license is
limited to two users and five clients. That's probably enough for one
project.

The catch to both of these is that someone has to manage the
repository. If you want to do it yourself, then I'd recommend
perforce, as my experience is that it causes fewer headaches than svn,
but all my subversion repository experience has been with larger team
repositories.

If you're willing to outsource repo management to someone else
(meaning you put your data on their servers), then there are
free/cheap solutions for project hosting with svn, but none that I
know of for perforce. Given that you're aren't developing source, that
may not work very well, and make sure you check out the fine print on
the agreement!

Since this is a mercurial list, I feel I should point out that there
are both large file modules and custom diff/merge hooks in mercurial,
so it could in theory be made to work well for such a thing. I haven't
heard much about the large file extension recently, so I'd expect it
to either be working well, or abandoned. diff/merge for video files I
can't speak to.

     <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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