• Registered: 2007-11-16
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Perplexed -- sample webcam doesn't work on my chumby?

At the moment, it seems the Oahu webcam is down, so just as a first experiment I tried changing the first line of the sample webcam widget available on the wiki at

   http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index. … cam_Widget

to read

   url = "http://www.pixcontroller.com/WebCam/video.jpg?now"; // link to the cam feed

it does not update at the specified 1000 ms rate.  In fact, I changed it to

   delay = 5000; // five second refresh rate

and it seems to update once every five MINUTES or so.

Further perplexitude happens when I see that it runs as expected in the virtual chumby!

???

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,200

Re: Perplexed -- sample webcam doesn't work on my chumby?

It should read:

url = "http://www.pixcontroller.com/WebCam/video.jpg?"+now;

The variable "now" changes on each fetch, which prevents the chumby's Flash Lite player from caching.  Since the upstream server is not specifying "no cache", then the chumby, by default, caches for five minutes. The desktop Flash Player has different behavior.

By putting "now" as a literal part of the URL, you were simply fetching the same image over and over, which the chumby pulled from the local cache.

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2007-11-16
  • Posts: 2

Re: Perplexed -- sample webcam doesn't work on my chumby?

Worked!

So... chumby caches?  Was that documented (maybe it's common for flash players to do that, I'm a flash beginner)?  And is there a way to turn that off?

BTW, as you can imagine I was iterating quite a bit trying to hack this one through, and wonder if you could make the icon upload and configuration widget upload be optional -- it made me have to go through two more popups and four more clicks...

Thanks!

  • Registered: 2007-11-09
  • Posts: 71

Re: Perplexed -- sample webcam doesn't work on my chumby?

rcthomas3000 wrote:

So... chumby caches?  Was that documented (maybe it's common for flash players to do that, I'm a flash beginner)?  And is there a way to turn that off?

chumby follows the directives given to it by the server that the content lives on. if chumby didn't obey the cacheing rules, then we'd be collectively bashing the heck out of any server that we get content from.

  • Registered: 2008-03-05
  • Posts: 119

Re: Perplexed -- sample webcam doesn't work on my chumby?

I just had the same problem, solved with this fix.

Maybe the sample webcam FLA (samplecam.fla) should contain this workaround?

I'm guessing there's lots and lots of people who have faced exactly this problem....