Capture Irregularities

Due to software upgrades, it has not always been possible to maintain a framerate of one picture every 30 seconds. Also, this morning the PC rebooted around 7:05 am, which stopped the capture process until restart at 9:30.

Since then a new version of the capture software has been installed, which has a few improvements on the back-end interface (no change in the web image distribution). The latest software running now is 1.0.1.57.

Viewing on Mobile Phone

A new portal to the webcam image has been installed, allowing access through mobile phone (currently only tested on Windows Mobile):

http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/m/webcam.php

The script for this page has been radically simplified, for fast loading and wide compatibility. It embeds the usual IFRAME method for including the picture and is therefore also automatically refreshing. The image size is automatically adjusted to the browser window size.

This access portal works also on any other web browser on a "normal" PC, providing just a simple window with the webcam image only.

New Script Version

The PHP script for sending out the captured image on request has been modified:

• The maximum sent image dimensions have been increased from 640x480 to 1280x1024. The previous version only sent 640x480, even if the originally captured image would have been larger.


• The refresh time has now been changed from a fixed value of 60 seconds to a variable value. The value depends on the time since the most recent image was captured and is set to twice the time difference between now and the file date of that image. A limiter sets the range of this refresh time result from 5 seconds to 10 minutes, to avoid either too rapid refresh or too long delays. This will now enable the distribution of image capture to be adapted automatically to the speed of the actual image capture. To show the currently used refresh rate, the caption text line has been amended.


• The size of the output image is now limited to the actual captured image size.

All these measures are seamless, because the next image refresh through the IFRAME will refresh the whole script, so that these new features are immediately available for anyone who has implemented the IFRAME image capture on their web site.

Server restart - camera update stopped

This morning at 5:07, the camera server in my office decided to shut down, probably because of some pending Windows Updates. Therefore, no new image was uploaded to the web server until now (10:55). The server now is up and running ok again. There still may be occasional outages, as I am currently getting more Windows updates.