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I'd like to offer video chat on my website and was wondering if anyone can recommend an API/service that'll let me do so. I'm familiar with OpenTok, but not happy that it uses Flash. Also, the audio tends to have a lot of noise/feedback - unless you are wearing a headset.
Suggestions?
EDIT:
I'm using it for P2P right now, but do want to do group video chat in the future.
Flash is one of my primary concerns. I noticed Flash sometimes crashes when I'm using OpenTok. Though Flash crashes other times, too -- it seems to be more frequent when using it for OpenTok. I understand Flash has its benefits (the big one for me is that I can almost count on my users having it), but I'd like to explore other options if possible. Flash is supposed to be a dying technology?
Audio is the other major concern. There is generally an echo going on and a noticeable delay. Using the same set up (Internet connection, computer, mic/speakers, etc.) and comparing it to Skype, it's obvious that Skype is far more superior.
The player is my final concern. Here are the things I don't like about it:
I can't remove the top left icon that links to OpenTok. Thus, this isn't something I can truly white label.
The player comes with volume control, but not video control (e.g. to stop publishing, to stop subscribing). Instead, I am forced to implement my own via the API. Though the API makes it fairly easy to do, I don't think I should have to. Video control should be provided, just like volume control.
OpenTok for WebRTC should solve all the issues you've noted above. Find more info here:http://tokbox.com/opentok/docs/concepts/WebRTC.html
You may want to check out the API's provided by TenHands (http://www.tenhands.net) to see if this meets your needs. The integration should be fairly straight forward.
Now there is also EasyRTC (easyrtc.com)
To make clear what Gerry said. You can use EasyRTC to build and peer peer video conferencing application. Using easyrtc Lib you can easily make a group chat[video+audio+text+file transfer] within a short time, just see their demo. They already provide a good list of demo application and easyrtc lib is well documented.
Note that, easyrtc does not use flash they use WebRTC. And for video controller you can easily embed HTML5 video controller in the tag.
Thanks
Happy Coding
It seems that Twilio had a very good progress recently:
https://www.twilio.com/video
Here's a "comparison" list of API providers as defined by VSee:
http://vsee.com/api
An no .. I don't have any vested interest in VSee.
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In past years I have learned the most important languages for web development (CSS, HTML, JS, PHP) and I can create good-structured sites.
But an important part of web design is the images used for buttons, backgrounds, text, gradients... Also the main logo is a very important element in the layout of a website.
However, I dont know how to get started in that side of web design for developing good looking websites.
What tools should use for that purposes? Do you know good guides?
I have read one books and some guides about photoshop, but they are about graphics design in general and I am looking for a guide/books focused on web graphic design and also (if posible), focused on how to place these images correctly using css and xhtml.
PD: Sorry for the bad English.
Thanks!
I'm certainly no pro, and probably not even very good myself, but I think one good way is to just do it. The more you practice, the more you learn and improve, and your designs will get better and better.
As you are building sites, you'll run into "problems" which you can then find answers to on the internet or on sites like stack overflow. It's also useful to look at designs from other sites and try to see how they did it.
In terms of tools, you probably don't need anything really fancy to get started. I mostly only use Paint.NET and InkScape. I try to use few images if I can.
Ever since I started learning web design & development what I find most effective for learning is looking at other web sites. In looking at other web sites it is advisable to look at examples of both good and bad design, just so you're aware of the difference.
Learning by example is, for me, the best way to learn because you really see how design concepts and ideas are applied. When you finally have an idea on the look and feel that you want to apply to your web site then you can start researching on the technicalities of creating them (e.g. Google 'how to paint shop pro web 2.0-style buttons' or 'how to photoshop gradient web buttons'). It's really up to you on which tool you want to use because it depends on what you're comfortable with using. An upside of using Photoshop, I think, is that there are a lot of tutorials that you can just Google for online.
I recommend going to http://www.alistapart.com/ for guides, articles & tutorials on web design.
Here is the web designing tutorials.
40+ Greatest Web Interface Design Photoshop Tutorials, Part I
Pegaweb
Web dev tuts
WebDesign
25 Photoshop Tutorials for Web Designers
Blue Print Layout: Converting a PSD to HTML Tutorial
You may use the boostrap plugin. I have discovered a site http://www.webdesignernews.com/
You may see there are many ideas of creating a website.
This site is very useful to create professional style navigation bars and loading style or types of buttons, etc.
For logos and all Canva is best to use where you can design logos facebook cover, poster and all necessary things. All the sites mentioned above are completely free.
For some ideas of creating web pages You may visit TheSoftwareGuy.
believing that knowing how to use photoshop is enough to tell people you can design websites is wrong. Tools can definitely make the difference but that doesn't replace a person's real talent and skill that gives the design a unique edge.
my 2 cents.
You can follow the approch like create a template using Photoshop or Gimph. If you are creating a site for client create a 2-3 templates with different layouts and show them to client. If they are good and approved, create a HTML templates for those and after that embed server side.
After a practice can design a better site.
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What is the best API to utilize in developing an application that handles both realtime MIDI and audio input and output? This would be for an application that is used in the process of making music as opposed to playing audio or MIDI files. I'm aware that this may be a subjective question, but if you know of an API that is dominantly used for these purposes, please share it.
I'm agnostic about which language the API is for, and I also don't care about portability. The real concern is for an API that is well documented, well designed (e.g. thought out and intuitive to developers using it), and actively maintained. OS portability would be nice, but it is second to having an API/Language that meets the previous requirements.
Please note that the emphasis is not on API's for sound synthesis or for composing music with code. It is intended for the handling of sound file and MIDI data in a real-time context.
It's probably a pretty roundabout way of doing it, but I'd be pretty excited to work with MIDI in HTML5. Writing a MIDI synth in JS would probably be rather trivial, thanks to the new audio APIs that are making their way onto the web. Since it's in a web browser, you can do some of the preliminary processing on the client and then do some of the hardcore processing on the server.
I should also mention that HTML is a great language to create a GUI for this sort of app, and the cross-platform benefits are inherent in the fact that it's made for the web.
This is a bit late, but SuperCollider and cSound would be well worth checking out.
Supercollider https://supercollider.github.io/
cSound http://www.csounds.com/
You might want to look at some unconventional "languages" (well, dataflow programming environments) like:
pd: http://puredata.info/
MAX/MSP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)
Reaktor: http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/producer/reaktor-5/
I've also done some mucking about with Java and MIDI and had a good time with that.
I never used it personally tho, but there is a C-like language dedicated to music called Chuck.
Ruby works very well, as seen on the Sonic Pi.
The W3C has some solid specs on the web audio API. It's a powerful api that can allow you to synthesize, edit, and analyze sound. You can also import audio via arrayBuffers. It also has very strong support.
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I'm trying to produce a timeline for my real-time embedded code.
I need to show all the interrupts, what triggers them, when they are serviced, how long they execute, etc. I have done the profiling and have the raw data, now I need a way to show the timeline graphically, to scale.
I've been searching for a good tool, but haven't come up with anything great yet. Everything that I've found works on timelines of days and years. I want a graph showing a single 2-millisecond cycle. For now I'm using Visio, but I keep thinking there must be something easier. Any ideas?
I'm hoping to produce something like this: .
Unfortunately, mine is more complicated, but that's the general idea.
So at that scale your abscissas is going to be a pure number (e.g. microseconds from the start time, or some such). Graphing tools to graph things like this are commonplace.
I'd suggest something like gnuplot, but I suspect there's more to the problem than is evident in your summary.
Ah, the picture makes it all much clearer. If gnuplot doesn't do it for you, I'll offer another suggestion (or at least tell you what I'd do): write it from scratch.
Specifically, I'd probably throw together something in a scripting language (ruby, python, whatever) to read the data and generate pic code that looked the way I wanted. If you decide to go that route, here's an overview of pic basics and also the manual. If you dig in you should have something plausible in an hour and within a week you'll have something that suits you better than any off the shelf GUI app ever will.
I feel for you. In my system, we have a 1.1 millisecond cycle and 13 measurement points over 4 different components. I suspect you're facing similar complexity.
Bad news is there are no off-the-shelf solutions I'm aware of. However MarkusQ is correct stating that you can use (abuse?) standard graphing packages to accomplish what you need. But you will need to invest some time to customize the output to your liking.
We make extensive use of the R Project driven by Python code via RPy R/Python bridge to generate our plots. This setup works very well for us and has enabled us to automate the process. Python is used to acquire and cleanse the data from the real-time system and R does the drawing.
R's graphics customization support is extensive allowing you to control all aspects of the plot, locations, sizes, etc. It can be intimidating at first, but there is an excellent book R Graphics that helps with a companion website that contains all of the book's examples.
Whatever you choose, make sure there's the ability to automate via scripting. The amount of data real-time systems generate is too much to deal with without flexible tools.
gtkwave could be used
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If its dead, is there a successor?
For those who didn't know:
The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.
NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.
Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.
It is not dead, but still used by guys who do prefer plain-text over animated emoticons and flashy ad-banners.
Seriously, I have been using it since ten years and I cannot detect any drop in the number of articles or users.
It's not dead - there's still plenty of traffic in the public C# group, for instance.
StackOverflow is becoming a pseudo-successor - but only for some kinds of threads. Q&A threads are ideally suited to SO; discussion threads don't work nearly as well here as they do in newsgroups.
I have never been on Usenet. But I use several “private” NNTP servers (disconnected from Usenet), including the awesome NNTP interface to mailing lists: http://gmane.org/
Edit: oh and none of those servers I use needs an "account". Yet they're quite spam-free.
I know many people like myself who still use nntp / usenet on a daily basis. It is an absolutely invaluable tool. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.
It's like the pinball machine of online communities. All the new kids may not know what it's all about and may think it is dead, but it is still alive and kicking and there's still nothing that can compare.
It's not dead (yet?) but it's being replaced by feeds and feedreader (RSS and Atom)
It's nowhere near as relevant as it once was. Nowadays any popular forum is going to be web-based. For example, stackoverflow would be very crap if based around NNTP. You just can't provide the same experience when your interaction with the forum software is so limited.
Another big problem is that you can't display a CAPTCHA over NNTP, or indeed provide any other modern interactive anti-spam measure.
I'd say yes, it's practically dead.
Agreed, NNTP's time is past. We have good connectivity; there is no need to replicate data across multiple servers any more. I use Google Groups in preference to NNTP.
However, NNTP does provide some community assurance against catastrophic failure. There's probably an open-source project in there somewhere for web-based forums to provide this kind of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balanced services.
The only true NNTP Replacement could be Mailing lists. Not any web-based forum.
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I'm working on an application that needs to quickly render simple 3D scenes on the server, and then return them as a JPEG via HTTP. Basically, I want to be able to simply include a dynamic 3D scene in an HTML page, by doing something like:
<img src="http://www.myserver.com/renderimage?scene=1&x=123&y=123&z=123">
My question is about what technologies to use to do the rendering. In a desktop application I would quite naturally use DirectX, but I'm afraid it might not be ideal for a server-side application that would be creating images for dozens or even hundreds of users in tandem. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is there a 3D API (preferably freely available) that would be ideal for this application? Is it better to write a software renderer from scratch?
My main concerns about using DirectX or OpenGL, is whether it will function well in a virtualized server environment, and whether it makes sense with typical server hardware (over which I have little control).
RealityServer by mental images is designed to do precisely what is described here. More details are available on the product page (including a downloadable Developer Edition).
RealityServer docs
Id say your best bet is have a Direct3D/OpenGL app running on the server (without stopping). THen making the server page send a request to the rendering app, and have the rendering app snend a jpg/png/whatever back.
If Direct3D/OpenGL is to slow to render the scene in hardware, then any software solution will be worse
By keep the rendering app running, you are avoiding the overhead of creating/destroying textures, backbuffers, vertex buffers, etc. You could potentialy render a simply scene 100's of times a second.
However many servers do not have graphics cards. Direct3D is largly useless in software (there is an emulated device from Ms, but its only good for testing effects), never tried OpenGL in software.
You could wrap Pov-ray (here using POSIX and the Windows build). PHP example:
<?php
chdir("/tmp");
#unlink("demo.png");
system("~janus/.wine/drive_c/POV-Ray-v3.7-RC6/bin/pvengine-sse2.exe /render demo.pov /exit");
header("Content-type: image/png");
fpassthru($f = fopen("demo.png","r"));
fclose($f);
?>
demo.pov available here.
You could use a templating language like Jinja2 to insert your own camera coordinates.
Server side rendering only makes sense if the scene consists of a huge number of objects such that the download of the data set to the client for client rendering would be far too slow and the rendering is not expected to be in realtime. Client side rendering isn't too difficult if you use something like jogl coupled with progressive scene download (i.e. download foreground objects and render, then incrementally download objects based on distance from view point and re-render).
If you really want to do server side rendering, you may want to separate the web server part and the rendering part onto two computers with each configured optimally for their task (renderer has OpenGL card, minimal HD and just enough RAM, server has lots of fast disks, lots of ram, backups and no OpenGL). I very much doubt you will be able to do hardware rendering on a virtualised server since the server probably doesn't have a GPU.
Not so much an API but rather a renderer; Povray? There also seem to exist a http interface...
You could also look at Java3D (https://java3d.dev.java.net/), which would be an elegant solution if your server architecture was Java-based already.
I'd also recommend trying to get away with a software-only rendering solution if you can - trying to wrangle a whole lot of server processes that are all making concurrent demands on the 3D rendering hardware sounds like a lot of work.
Yafaray (http://www.yafaray.org/) might be a good first choice to consider for general 3D rendering. It's reasonably fast and the results look great. It can be used within other software, e.g. the Blender 3D modeler. The license is LPGL.
If the server-side software happens to be written in Python, and the desired 3D scene is a visualization of scientific data, look into MayaVi2 http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/, or if not, go for a browse at http://www.vrplumber.com/py3d.py
Those who suggest the widely popular POV-Ray need to realize it's not a library or any kind of entity that offers an API. The server-side process would need to write a text scene file, execute a new process to run POV-Ray with the right options, and take the resulting image file. If that's easy to set up for a particular application, and if you've more expertise with POV-Ray than with other renderers, well go for it!
Check out wgpu.net.
I think it's very helpful.