Manually configure file sharing

Manually configure file sharing

Compressor automatically manages the file sharing required for distributed processing. However, if you want to use your own file sharing system (such as a dedicated file server, Xsan, or NAS), you can turn off automatic file sharing, then manually configure file sharing and manually mount the shared volumes.

For example, if you have a file server or SAN (a storage area network such as Xsan), you can use it to hold your source files and any files transcoded from those source files. This allows you to provide a file sharing strategy that best suits your environment.

Important: When you turn off automatic file sharing with the intention of submitting to a shared group of computers, you must use the common shared volume (or volumes) on all of the computers for the location of the source files and for the location of the transcoded files. If you don’t do this, computers in your shared computer group will not be able to read or write the files needed for your batch.

Turn off automatic file sharing

  1. Choose Compressor > Preferences (or press Command-Comma), then click Shared Computers at the top of the window.

  2. In the Shared Computers pane, click the “Enable automatic file sharing” checkbox to deselect it.

Important: When submitting to a shared group of computers, you must use the same volume for the location of the source files and the location of the transcoded files. For more information, see Work with locations.

Manually configure SMB file sharing

Important: If you’ve already set up your own file sharing system, you can skip this task and go to the next one.

  1. In Mac OS X, choose Apple menu > System Preferences.

  2. Click Sharing.

  3. In the Sharing preferences pane, select the File Sharing checkbox on the left to turn on file sharing.

You can confirm that SMB sharing is on by clicking the Options button and verifying that the “Share files and folders using SMB” checkbox is selected.

Manually mount the SMB volume you enabled

For each computer in your shared computer group, or for any computer you wish to have access to the shared volume, do the following:

  1. In OS X Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server.

  2. In the window that appears, enter the server address for the SMB volume that you want to mount, then click Connect.

    For example, you could enter “smb://MySuperServer.”

  3. In the window that appears, select an authentication method, enter appropriate credentials to access the shared volume, and click Connect.

  4. In the window that appears, select the volume that you want to mount and click OK.

If you are using one computer for submitting Compressor batches and another computer for file sharing, be sure to mount the shared volume on the computer you’re using to submit Compressor batches.