Version control systems geared towards multimedia (large files)?

Are there any version control systems out there that are particularly good (or bad) at dealing with large files? Nothing too crazy, but from several hundred megabytes to a gigabyte, let's say.

We currently have subversion in place, but there are some mutterings about it not being ideal for this purpose. I'm not a developer myself, and I don't know how objective they are being, so I thought I'd do a quick community survey for extra info.

I'm interested in the behaviour or suitability of these VCS solutions from a systems point of view as well as the user point of view.

TIA.

Solution 1:

Another option made for multimedia and creative workflows is AlienBrain which is now owned by Avid. It's used by a lot of game studio's to version control the game assets and code.

http://www.alienbrain.com/

It may not be the best solution though if you're not dealing with media assets.

Solution 2:

You'll find that they are very much of a muchness when it comes to binary files.

The mutterings you have heard are most likely originating from the notion that version controlling binaries is a little bit at odds with the power of version control. Binary files can't be diffed or merged, so they are treated as dumb copies. The whole file is replaced on every small change.

This isn't to say that you can't version control binary files or indeed that it isn't useful for you to do so. If you have the requirement to roll-back a file to the version that you committed yesterday. In which case it has served a use to you.

Although you might find a storage solution with snapshots serves you better and more efficiently.