Metus INGEST Professional digitizes large video archive in Sweden

The Swedish National Library preserves all TV and Radio broadcasts in Sweden for future research. The archive consists of over 10 million hours of material, largely of analogue magnetic tapes.

In 2019, a 36-channel Metus INGEST Professional, supplied by the Swedish dealer, Mediability Sweden AB, was installed in order to migrate the analogue videotapes to digital video files.

It was consisted of 9 Intel Core i7-8700K Ingest workstations with Quadro P2000 GPU, each encoding 4 channels in different profiles: H.264 / AVC (ISO / IEC 14496-10), FFV1.3, YUY2, V210 and DV-DIF. The system was configured with the option to use Metus INGEST JPEG2000 Codec. 12 channels are controlled by an automated workflow engine, which also controls a large VHS tape robot and its 12 Panasonic VHS players.

The requirements for the digitization systems were that it would be a flexible system with a well-designed GUI, and alternatively be controllable via API. These requirements were easily met by Metus INGEST and in addition you can switch to different encoders, for different purposes.For their special request, Metus R&D made the required developments for supporting this new FFV1.3 and DV-DIF file format. 

Compared to open source solutions, Metus won the open procurement thanks to its excellent GUI and open API. The head of media digitization at the Swedish National Library, Mrs. Kaisa Unander says "With Metus Ingest, we have a flexible and unified system for trouble-free digitization for a long time to come."