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#7300
David Webb
General Member

The cameras have been a challenging topic. Few little hurdles to overcome with those:

  • Currently, the Marshall and AJX cameras are FTPing an image every 5 minutes or so to the website; as you can imagine, that adds up (space) and would slowly gobble up storage unchecked. Props to Ken for dealing with that, as I’m sure that required either paying for storage or clearing out older files on a periodic basis. Definitely think it’s cool that you can “turn back the clock” to see older images (maybe the camera caught you on launch taking off), so will be setting up an integration with something like Amazon S3 (a cloud-based storage solution which is almost free) to handle the large volume of images (in addition to offloading all of the images posted in the forum).
  • That animation is pretty rough (browser has to download and load all of those images before it looks like anything). Definitely like the idea of it – can look into developing a more robust solution for that (perhaps something that converts the last 24 images into an animated JPG and then compresses it which should be a huge boost to performance).
  • AJX and Marshall both produce static images and Crestline produces “video” (I use the air quotes for video, since the viewer is actually streaming out a bunch of static images instead of real video); there are additional web cams in AJX as well, but they will only output video to the vendor’s mobile app (so we can’t embed those on the website). Both real video and static images have their pros and cons, but it would be great if we could move toward a consistent solution for all 3.
  • Crestline cam – appears to be a very nice piece of hardware, but the software doesn’t really allow for embedding that on a website (on the current site, it’s their viewer stuck inside an iframe, and if you look at what’s going on behind the scenes, your browser is constantly downloading images – if you’re on launch and just want to check a camera, this will crush your connection)