I'm sure that this must have been figured out a million times already, which is why I'm asking.
I fetch files (JSON, PNG, XML, plist) from an HTTP server and save them locally. Then these files are read, processed and displayed. My issue is that I want to know if there is a newer file on the server when I am about to proceed to a screen that will be displaying the downloaded data. In that case, I'd like to get the file, store it and use that info.
Thanks in advance.
Looks like there are good answers out there already. Just took some creative thinking on how to find them!
http://iphoneincubator.com/blog/server-communication/how-to-download-a-file-only-if-it-has-been-updated
Great stuff.
Related
The new .zif single file format provided by Zoomify Pro seems to have some performance issues. Comparing it to the old file structure it loads the page 3 to 4 times slower and the requests that it sends exceed 50% more (Tested with the same initial image in multiple file formats).
Using the old format is not feasible for out product and we are stuck with over a minute of load time.
Has anyone encountered this issue, and are there some workarounds? The results in the internet and the official site doesn't seem to be of any help.
NOTE: Contacting the vendor hasn't led to anything yet.
Although the official site claims the zif format could handle very large image, I'm skeptical about it because the viewer tries to do everything in Javascript. The performance is entire based on the client's machine. Try opening it on a faster machine and see if it improves.
Alternative solution: You could create Deep Zoom Image tiles by using VIPS library.
More information here:
https://libvips.github.io/libvips/API/current/Making-image-pyramids.md.html
Scroll further down in the article and you'll see this snippet:
With 7.40 and later, you can use --container to set the container
type. Normally dzsave will write a tree of directories, but with
--container zip you'll get a zip file instead. Use .zip as the directory suffix to turn on zip format automatically:
$ vips dzsave wtc.tif mypyr.zip
to write a zipfile containing the tiles.
Also, checkout this tutorial:
Serve deepzoom images from a zip archive with openseadragon
https://web.archive.org/web/20170310042401/https://literarymachin.es/deepzoom-osd-server/
The community (openseadragon and vips) is much stronger over there so you'll get help when you hit a wall.
If you want to take a break from all of this and just want the images zoomable, you could use 3rd party service such as zoomable.ca or zoomo.ca. It’s free and user friendly (upload your image and embed the viewer to your site like Google Map).
ZIF format designer here... ZIF can easily handle monstrous images, up to hundreds of terabytes in size.
Without a server, of course the viewer tries to do everything, it's the only option. As a result, serving ZIF directly from a webserver will not be as performant as using an image server. But... you can DO it. Using Zoomify tile folders, speed will be faster, but you may have hundreds of thousands or millions of tiles to deal with at the server side, and transfers will be horrendously slow and error-prone.
There are always trade-offs.See zif.photo for specification.
ChicageBoss controller API has this
{stream, Generator::function(), Acc0}
Stream a response to the client using HTTP chunked encoding. For each
chunk, the Generator function is passed an accumulator (initally Acc0)
and should return either {output, Data, Acc1} or done.
I am wondering what is the use case for this? There are others like Json, output. When will this stream be useful?
Can someone present an use case in real world?
Serving large files for download might be the most straight-forward use case.
You could argue that there are also other ways to serve files so that users can download them, but these might have other disadvantages:
By streaming the file, you don't have to read the entire file into memory before starting to send the response to the client. For small files, you could just read the content of the file, and return it as {output, BinaryContent, CustomHeader}. But that might become tricky if you want to serve large files like disk images.
People often suggest to serve downloadable files as static files (e.g. here). However, these downloads bypass all controllers, which might be an issue if you want things like download counters or access restrictions. Caching might be an issue, too.
I'm building a mobile app using Meteor. To allow for offline usage of the app, I want the app to be able to download a large-ish json file while online, then access the data in the json file, written to MongoDB, while offline.
This works fine. However, in the downloaded json file, there are plenty of references to online images that won't display in the app once the app is offline.
So, I want to be able to download (a selection of) the images referenced in the json file to the app, so that the app can access them even when offline.
(Downloading images could happen in the background for as long as a connection is available.)
There's an implementation of imgCache.js available on Atmosphere, which fails to initialize for me.
I suppose it's theoretically possible to individually load each image to a canvas, save the canvas content to MongoDB, then load the content when needed. Info on some of this is here. But, this feels rather convoluted and, if really feasible, I would expect someone to have done this before with success.
How can I do achieve caching of images for offline use in Meteor?
So, you've probably already read this article about application cache.
If the images are static, you can just include them in the manifest. Be sure you understand the manifest and cache expirations (see the article).
If the images are dynamic, you'll find some techniques to store images in local storage
If that's the case, this may be what you want.
It is possible to implement a feature that allows users to watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others. Is html 5 suitable for this task? But flash? Are there any read to go solutions, don't want to reinvent the wheel. The application will be hosted on a dedicated server.
Thanks.
Of course it is possible, the data is there isnt it?
However it will be very hard to implement.
Also I am not so into python and I am not aware of a library or service suiting your requirements, but I can cover the basics of video streaming.
I assume you are talking about video files that are uploaded and not streams. Because, for that, there are obviously thousands of solutions out there...
In the most simple case the video being uploaded is already ready to be served to your clients and has a so called "faststart atom". They are container format specific and there are sometimes a bunch of them. The most common is the moov-atom. It contains a lot of data and is very complex, however in our use case, in a nutshell, it holds the data that enables the client to begin playing the video right away using the data available from the beginning.
You need that if you have progressive download videos (youtube...), meaning where a file is served from a Webserver. You obviously have not downloaded the full file and the player already can start playing.
If the fastastart atom was not present, that would not be possible.
Sometimes it is, but the player for example cannot display a progress bar, because it doesnt know how long the file is.
Having that covered the file could be uploaded. You will need an upload solution that writes the data directly to a buffer or a file. (file will be easier...).
This is almost always the case, for example PHP creates a file in the tmp_dir. You can also specify it if you want to find the video while its being uploaded.
Well, now you can start reading that file byte by byte and print that data to a connection to another client. Just be sure not to go ahead of what has already been recieved and written. You would probaby initiate your upload with a metadata set in memory that holds the current recieved byte position and location of the file.
Anyone who requests the file after the uploaded has started can just recieve the entire file, or if the upload is not yet finished, get it from your application.
You will have to throttle the data delivery or pause it when the data becomes short. This will appear to the client almost as a "slow connection". However you will have to echo some data from time to time to prevent the connection from closing. But if your upload doesnt stall, and why shoud it?, that shouldnt be a problem.
Now if you want to have someting like on the fly transcoding of various input formats into your desired output format, things get interesting.
AFAIK ffmpeg has neat apis which lets you directly deal with datasterams.
Also handbrake is a very good tool, however you would need to take the long road using external executeables.
I am not really aware of your requirements, however if your clients are already tuned in, for example on a red 5 streaming server, feeding data into a stream should also work fine.
Yes, take a look at Qik, http://qik.com/
"Instant Video Sharing ... Videos can be viewed live (right as they are being recorded) or anytime later."
Qik provides developer APIs, including ones like these:
qik.stream.subscribe_public_recent -- Subscribe to the videos (live and recorded)
qik.user.following -- Provides the list of people the user is following
qik.stream.public_info -- Get public information for a specific video
It is most certainly to do this, but it won't be trivial. And no, I don't think that you will find an "out of the box" solution that will require little effort on your behalf.
You say you want to let:
users watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others
Well, this could be interpreted two different ways:
Do you mean that you don't want a user to have to refresh the page before seeing new videos that other users have just finished uploading?
Or do you mean that you want one user to be able to watch a partially uploaded video (aka another user is still in the process of uploading it and right now the server only contains a partial upload of the video)?
Implementing #1 wouldn't be hard at all whatsoever. You would just need an AJAX script to check for newly uploaded videos, and those videos could then be served to the user in whatever way you choose. HTML5 vs. Flash isn't really a consideration here.
The second scenario, on the other hand, would require quite a bit of effort. I am guessing that HTML5 might not be mature enough to handle this type of situation. If you are not looking
to reinvent the wheel and don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this feature than I would say that you would be out of luck. You may be able to use ffmpeg to parse partial video files and feed them to a Flash player, but I would think of this as a large task.
Anybody know how i can stream load Model data in XNA 4 Content Loader ?
And not have to specify a farken filename ...
Was hoping somehow get a stream running as the model data resides on a db.
And no, im not interested in temp files :p
Regards
If you really want to use the Content Pipeline for this, you can subclass ContentManager and override OpenStream. This would assume that the built XNB files reside in the database and you can provide the stream to them when requested :)
Content.Load<Model>() requires a string parameter, so I don't think that you'll be able to stream a Model in. I should mention that the string parameter that is required is a filePath, so you wouldn't be able to convert a stream to a string and pass that in.
I believe that this should help. If I remember correctly, I can't check because I'm at work, it lets you run the content importer on a stream dynamically. So you should be able to dump your file in a MemeoryStream and load it so long as its any of the file types XNA supports.
Be warned though this is pretty slow because you have to compile every file when you load it.
Curious of why you need to load from a database. I assume its from a remote server? In which case the download time + compile time might be a bit much. since it sounds like you would have to do it every time the game is loaded.
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/winforms_series_2