[spook-l] Progressive JPEG.

[Jeff Bowden]

Nathan Lutchansky wrote:

>>I've used camserv before. It does offer some neat features although it's 
>>got an unecessarily long latency and the code is not so pretty.
>>    
>>
>
>Any neat features you like from camserv that should be in Spook?  -Nathan
>  
>


The main neat feature is camserv-relay which supports the scenario where 
the camera is on a relatively low-bandwidth connection but the web page 
serving the image is on a high-bandwidth server.  It only pulls from the 
camera when someone is watching and it fans out from the high-bandwidth 
server so the machine with the camera only has to supply one connection 
worth of bandwidth to support as many users as the high-bandwidth server 
can dish out.

I have managed to provide equivalent functionality w/o the multi-part 
jpegs using some apache cache hackery, but it still requires that images 
be grabbed and saved to a file even when no one is watching.   It would 
be ideal if there was a setup that worked like camserv-relay but without 
the high-latency and flakiness -- I forgot to mention this in my 
previous message but camserv-relay is not very robust.  Everytime any 
part of the chain is restarted it has to be manually massaged back into 
a working state.  Maybe they've fixed it by now but when I tried to dive 
into the code to fix it myself it seemed to me like it needed a rewrite.