Installation

The following preconditions must be met before you can install Video 4.6.0-1 in a Content Engine:

  • A suitable version of the Escenic Content Engine and Escenic assembly tool have been installed as described in the Escenic Content Engine Installation Guide and are in working order.

  • You have set up an Amazon S3 account that you can use for storing video files. For general information about how to do this, and how to configure the Content Engine to use S3 for storage of binary files, see Amazon S3 Storage. More specific instructions about the Video plug-in's use of S3 storage is provided in Configuration.

  • You have set up an Amazon Elastic Transcoder account, and defined the pipelines and presets you are going to use. For details about how to do this, see the Elastic Transcoder documentation

  • You have the credentials needed to access Escenic's SW repositories.

Choosing an installation method

Until recently, all Escenic-supplied components had to be installed by manually downloading and unpacking archive files. This is no longer the case. The Content Engine itself, the assembly tool, the ece scripts and all plug-ins are now available as deb packages (for installing on Ubuntu/Debian systems) and as rpm packages (for installation on RedHat/CentOS systems). This is now the recommended method of installing Escenic systems, although it is still possible to use the old method based on manually downloading and unpacking archives. Note, however, that when you are installing a plug-in on an existing Content Engine installation, you should use the same installation method as you used for the Content Engine itself.

Using the new package installation method offers many advantages over the old manual installation procedure:

  • It is faster and quicker

  • It is significantly less error-prone

  • It supports a fully automated upgrade process in which not only the installed packages themselves are upgraded, but also deployed EAR files. An upgrade script automatically checks the EAR files for copies of JAR files that have been updated, and replaces then with the new versions.

The old installation method will continue to be documented for the moment. Components installed using the new method are installed in /usr/share/escenic, whereas the old method recommends installation in /opt/escenic, and some other path components are slightly different. To cope with these differences, the following placeholders are used in some paths:

Placeholder NEW METHOD path OLD METHOD path

engine-installation

/usr/share/escenic/escenic-content-engine-engine-version

/opt/escenic/engine

assemblytool_installation

/usr/share/escenic/escenic-assemblytool

/opt/escenic/assemblytool

When installing the Video plug-in, you should use the same method as you used to install the Escenic Content Engine.

Note that if you are planning to install the Escenic Content Engine using the new package-based method, you can install the Video plug-in simultaneously by simply including the Video plug-in package name (escenic-video) in the apt-get installation command. You only need to follow this procedure if you have already installed the Content Engine and now need to install the Video plug-in.

If you use CUE as your Escenic editor and intend to use CUE for video handling, then in addition to installing the Escenic Video plug-in, you also need to install a matching CUE Video plug-in into the CUE editor itself. Whichever method you plan to use for installing the Escenic plug-in, CUE plugins are always package-based installations. For details, see CUE Plug-in Installation.