It is absolutely possible without doing anything extra. Hadoop provides us the facility to read/write binary files. So, practically anything which can be converted into bytes can be stored into HDFS(images, videos etc). To do that Hadoop provides something called as SequenceFiles. SequenceFile is a flat file consisting of binary key/value pairs. The SequenceFile provides a Writer, Reader and Sorter classes for writing, reading and sorting respectively. So, you could convert your image/video file into a SeuenceFile and store it into the HDFS. Here is small piece of code that will take an image file and convert it into a SequenceFile, where name of the file is the key and image content is the value :
public class ImageToSeq {
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
Configuration confHadoop = new Configuration();
confHadoop.addResource(new Path("/hadoop/projects/hadoop-1.0.4/conf/core-site.xml"));
confHadoop.addResource(new Path("/hadoop/projects/hadoop-1.0.4/conf/hdfs-site.xml"));
FileSystem fs = FileSystem.get(confHadoop);
Path inPath = new Path("/mapin/1.png");
Path outPath = new Path("/mapin/11.png");
FSDataInputStream in = null;
Text key = new Text();
BytesWritable value = new BytesWritable();
SequenceFile.Writer writer = null;
try{
in = fs.open(inPath);
byte buffer[] = new byte[in.available()];
in.read(buffer);
writer = SequenceFile.createWriter(fs, confHadoop, outPath, key.getClass(),value.getClass());
writer.append(new Text(inPath.getName()), new BytesWritable(buffer));
}catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Exception MESSAGES = "+e.getMessage());
}
finally {
IOUtils.closeStream(writer);
System.out.println("last line of the code....!!!!!!!!!!");
}
}
}
And if your intention is to just dump the files as it is, you could simply do this :
bin/hadoop fs -put /src_image_file /dst_image_file
And if your intent is more than just storing the files, you might find HIPI useful. HIPI is a library for Hadoop’s MapReduce framework that provides an API for performing image processing tasks in a distributed computing environment.
HTH