Use our packages for your distribution to install Vidispine.

Install the packages

You can either install the packages from our repository, or download and install the packages from our download page.

Vidispine requires Java 11 which may not be available in the official repositories of older distributions. Install a third party repository providing Java 11 or upgrade to a newer distribution.

Install from official repository

To install Vidispine directly from our repository, head over to the repository page and follow the instructions.

Initialize the database

  1. Create and give Vidispine access to an empty database:

    $ psql -c "CREATE USER vidispine PASSWORD 'vidispine'";
    $ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE vidispine OWNER vidispine";
    BASH

    On MySQL, make sure to use UTF-8:

    CREATE DATABASE vidispine CHARSET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
    SQL

    On Microsoft SQL Server create the database with a case-sensitive collation. As Vidispine consequently is using unicode (NVARCHAR) columns you do not need to care about the character set or code page.

    CREATE DATABASE vidispine COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS
    SQL

    Snapshot isolation must be enabled for Vidispine to operate properly. Execute these commands directly after creating the database:

    ALTER DATABASE vidispine SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON
    GO
    ALTER DATABASE vidispine SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON
    GO
    SQL

    Ensure that TCP/IP is enabled for your server.

  2. Modify the configuration file accordingly:

    $ vi /etc/vidispine/server.yaml
    BASH

    PostgreSQL:

    database:
      driverClass: org.postgresql.Driver
      url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost/vidispine
      user: vidispine
      password: vidispine
    YAML

    MySQL:

    database:
      driverClass: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
      url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/vidispine
      user: vidispine
      password: vidispine
    YAML

    Microsoft SQL Server:

    database:
      driverClass: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
      url: jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;instanceName=SQLEXPRESS;databaseName=vidispine
      user: vidispine
      password: vidispine
    YAML
  3. Initialize and migrate the database:

    $ vidispine db ping # verify connection
    $ vidispine db check # verify if tables exists (they shouldn't)
    $ vidispine db migrate
    $ vidispine db check # should succeed
    BASH

The /usr/bin/vidispine command is simply an alias to java -jar /usr/share/vidispine/server/vidispine-server.jar that is provided by the vidispine-server package.

Start the services

  1. Use systemd to start the services:

    $ systemctl start solr transcoder vidispine
    BASH
  2. Wait for Vidispine to start and then run APIinit to create the system metadata fields and the admin user.

    $ # wait for 8080 to become available, and then
    $ curl -X POST localhost:8080/APIinit
    BASH

    APIinit is a migration step that must be run manually. It will be made part of the migration command in the future.

  3. To verify that Vidispine is running, access http://localhost:8080/API/version using curl or HTTPie, or directly in your browser. The default admin password is admin.

    $ curl -X GET "localhost:8080/API/version" -uadmin:admin
    BASH

Troubleshooting

  • If the Vidispine service fails, then check the syslog or journal for errors:

    $ less /var/log/syslog
    BASH
    $ journalctl -xn
    BASH
  • If the service dies, or never becomes available for some reason, then check the server log:

    $ less /var/log/vidispine/server.log
    BASH
  • If the service fails to start with a “UnsupportedClassVersionError: Unsupported major.minor version 51.0”, then make sure that the default system Java version is 7+ and not 6 or lower.

    $ sudo update-alternatives --config java
    BASH

Configure Vidispine

Finally, you will need to configure Vidispine.