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Still Picture Serves Up Old Camera Shot
By: KeithPa Rank: New Member Topics: 8 From: USA	Added: 04/13/2010 - 06:13 PM Has anyone experienced a problem where the still picture access will serve up an older picture? I have a caption set up on the photo to show date and time and when I access the still picture for the first time it seems to show the picture from someone else's previous access to the page but the caption date and time will be current. (e.g. I pulled up the still photo around 11:00 and it showed the current time but with a picture from around 7:43am that someone else had pulled up) If I reload the browser it appears to fix itself, it only seems to be problem on the first access of the page. Is there some setting that could be triggering this? I'd think the browser was caching the photo but the timestamp of the caption is updated which throws me off.
By: KeithPa Rank: New Member Topics: 8 From: USA	Added: 04/13/2010 - 06:20 PM I may have found the problem. I don't recall how I got the img src link for the still picture but I had it set as current0.jpg so it must be saving a series of captured images. I've changed it to just current.jpg and I'll keep an eye on it to see if that solves the problem.
By: MelvinG Rank: Magna Cum Laude Topics: 661 From: Los Angeles, USA	Added: 04/14/2010 - 04:17 AM Actually current0.jpg is the still from Camera Nr. 0. If you have only one camera then current.jpg and current0.jpg are the same thing. If you have more than one cam then you use current0, current1, and so on to get a still from a particular cam. In multicam setups current.jpg should not be used if you want to be sure of which cam you'll get an image from (it's affected by cookies from web visitors). As for the problem you are having... it's not a bug, it's a feature . If nothing is consuming images (no web requests, no localsave, etc.) AbelCam throttles down after while to conserve CPU cycles. Instead of taking samples from the cam at the rate set by Framerate, it samples at some low rate like once every few minutes. Some find this to be good, others find it to be annoying. I battled this feature when I was making a script that saved a "collage" of the stills from all my cams periodically. I finally worked around it my making my code do this: - Get the image - Throw the mage away - Wait 2 seconds - Get the image - Use the image I believe the caption is applied when the image is served, so a fresh caption on a stale image is not surprising. Edit: Maybe SSE can clarify the "throttled down" mode for us. My "once every few minutes" may be wrong. I was just messinbg around with this using a cam pointed at a clock and got an image that was 20 minutes stale. So maybe sampling stops completely? If that's the case I don't think I like this feature...