[spook-l] Progressive JPEG.

[Nathan Lutchansky]

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On Sat, 13 Nov 2004, Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote:

> > > I would like to know if there are some plans for supporting more
> > > webbrowser-features in spook, such as possibly Progressive JPEG.
> > Progressive JPEG?  It sounds like you're talking about pushing JPEGs in a
> > multipart/x-mixed-replace stream, a la camserv.  The CVS tree contains
> > support for both multipart streaming and MJPEG-over-RTP.
> Well, I were talking of the little dirty-hack in the JPEG-encoding that is 
> supposed to render JPEG:s incrementally, with a first low-resoultion-variant, 
> on to more detailed levels, but can from what I've understodd be used to hack 
> video into beeing rendered into a regular web-browser?

Huh, I've seen lots of webservers that use multipart/x-mixed-replace but
not any that use progressive JPEG (and I am somewhat skeptical that it
works).  Can you point me to a webcam software package that does this?  I
don't believe the IJG JPEG encoder supports this hack, so I'd need to find
another coder that could be used.

> > > A lot of camservers seems to support hacking in JPEG-frames in a motion
> > > video through Progressive JPEG.
> > Yes, and I found that method so distasteful that I wrote Spook.  :-)
> Allright. ;) I agree, it's ugly, but nice for the dumb windows users. I still 
> haven't heard of any windows-user that have managed to view my xvid in 
> RTSP-stream from spook. :-/

It definitely works from QuickTime on Windows.  That's my primary testing 
platform, so I'm sure it works fine.

The QuickTime player can be embedded in a webpage, making it really easy
for dumb users.  I just put up <http://www.litech.org/spook/qt-embed.html>
that shows how to do this.

> > It's easy enough to create an HTML file on a usual webserver with the
> > refresh header set in a meta tag.  I know several users are doing this.
> > This gives you the flexibility to format the page and set up the refresh
> > any way you like, instead of using something hard-coded into Spook.
> I agree. This might be a useful thing to do for most users. But would it 
> really be difficult to create a simple HTML-template-engine in spook and 
> connect it to the existing webserver, just to offer the user an alternative 
> to installing Apache or some other external web-server?

That's actually on my to-do list, but pretty far down.  (Read: not funded)
Once I put in the local file access to do media streaming out of MP3 and 
AVI files, an HTML server won't be that hard to add.  For now, putting the 
HTML files on a different webserver is a pretty straightforward 
workaround.  -Nathan
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