wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Best Of 2015 is online, and Late Edit is open!
panoramas_de 2016-Jan-07 09:46:00
Yes, that's the problem.
Cylindrical pictures get tiled horizontally and the KRpano flash player can use them, but the HTML5 player does only work with cube faces (it uses 3d transformation of flat surfaces for speed, so anything "round" or "bent" will not play)
At the moment the best way to upload a cylinder is to output it as a sphere with the undefined pieces as black areas on top and bottom. Then you can set the tilt limits to keep those out of view. Since these areas are a uniform color, they do not add much to the JPEG image size. My goal is to have the prep server do this automatically for cylinders so contributors don't need to keep this in mind, but I need to rewrite the batch process for this to work.
We're currently looking into ways to salvage the QTVR files of the pre-2009 years to make them viewable again on non-Quicktime/non-Flash devices. There are several thousand of those, so this "repackaging" needs to be some kind of automated process. Quicktime (in the "not yet Quicktime X" days) was able to do a lot of things inside QTVR files that do not easily translate into HTML5, but most of the contributions should carry over just fine once I can work out some stable repeatable process. It sometimes feels like computer archeology ? even getting some of the QTVR tools to run today requires VM'ing old OSes or dusting off some specimen from my "old computers" vault. (remember the autorun sprite tracks, Sorenson Video or Cinepak compression?)
The first WWP now dates back twelve years, which in "computer years" makes this something like ? 120 years? ;-) I'm really glad we've standardized on JPEG later so we'll have a unified baseline for future changes in playback technology ...
-Markus