Nathanael Lawrence's dashboard

Full disclosure: I'm just your fellow user, so hopefully someone official will chime in here.

All I know so far is that your specific computer is having some sort of problem with Silverlight, but it's difficult for me to pin down since I don't have the same problem, nor have I heard of anyone else reporting it.

I am highly interested in the fact that the Channel 9 video player (the big ones) works alright for you but the Channel 10 videos crash your browser. I'm sure that tells us something important but I'm not sure what it is. (You are saying that the bigger video players play the video here on this page, right? - not launch the video in a new window?)

I'll keep thinking it over. In the meantime I guess I'm wondering whether you have Internet Explorer 8 installed or if you're using an older version. I assume that you have Firefox 3.5.5 installed since it tries to update automatically.

If you don't hear back from someone here soon I would check over on the Silverlight help forums since it seems to be a Silverlight problem - more widespread than just the Photosynth viewer.

As a last ditch effort you could try the older Direct3D Photosynth viewer. If you use the same username on Photosynth.net as you do here on Get Satisfaction then I believe that this should be the link straight to the Direct3D viewer for your first synth:
http://photosynth.net/d3d/photosynth....

It requires that your computer have all the appropriate software installed to run 3D graphics (Up to date DirectX, up to date drivers for your video card, hardware acceleration settings in Windows set to full, etc.) which gave so many people problems that they changed over to Silverlight which is just one small single installation that doesn't bother with your graphics card at all. By and far the Silverlight viewer has been a huge improvement in getting things to work for people right off the bat but unfortunately not in your case. Anyway, try it and see if it works and I'll keep looking for an answer to your Silverlight problems.

I don't suppose you get any specific error messages when your browser crashes? It would sure help to have those in front of me if there are such things.

So where exactly on photosynth.net do your browsers crash?
Only on pages with synths in them?

Can you confirm that you have Silverlight 3 installed on your computer?

Do you have the same problem on other pages that use Silverlight?
For example do these sites work for you or also crash your browsers:
http://seadragon.com
http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/

How about these video players?

I'd definitely be interested in your results. I'm sure I'll find it either way.

Paul, I'm not Live Labs although I certainly hope you get your answer.

Perhaps I'm the only one in the room not fully getting what you're asking but are you thinking of the deprecated Direct3D Photosynth viewer or the new Silverlight 3 viewer which includes features like Highlights and Overhead View? The same goes for HDView, I suppose. The real HDView is already a DirectX viewer, isn't it? Is the in-progress Silverlight port, HDView SL (actually lacking in features compared to its big brother), not what you're thinking of integrating, then?

Again, with Virtual Earth, the 3D control is DirectX (at least that was my understanding), but the newest version of the map control is the 2D Silverlight control. We've even seen the WPF version of Worldwide Telescope being ported to Silverlight (again, lacking 3D for the Silverlight 3 lifecycle).

It's clear enough to me that with each and every last one of these products porting to Silverlight, the integration of them all in the next few years is inevitable on the web. I can only hope that that doesn't also carry with it the death of the higher performance DirectX-reliant client-side apps. (To be fair, all of these clients are pulling down online information already so performance shouldn't be hit too hard on modern machines or should be negligible when hardware acceleration comes to Silverlight.)

In any case, I'm imagining that waiting those few years for Microsoft to integrate all the Silverlight ports is not the timetable you're looking for, but really more of an API for any of the DirectX viewers so that you can integrate them all within the same app at your planetarium.

No problem.

Also, if you're going to truly be doing major surgery and there's just no way that the EXIF data will line up with the crop, you could just copy the pixels in Photoshop and save them in a new image. Presumably this strips out all metadata (not totally sure what Photoshop's protocol is there) and there wouldn't be any discord between the pixels and the metadata.

On the downside, though, Photosynth does much better when EXIF is present (and accurate, naturally).

Swami, this old thread may provide a few clues for you.

Great news, Aseem!

Perhaps this isn't quite the right place for this, but the timing seems more than coincidental - I've been admiring the improved experience on the iPhone. Granted, it's an update to Seadragon.com, perhaps more than Seadragon Ajax per se, but I noticed that multi-touch now works on the iPhone in Seajax and the new option to launch Seadragon Mobile is insanely great. =]

In any case, the wrapping support is fantastic, as is further canvas support. Keep up the excellent work!

While this *is* great news, the JPEG artifacting is out of control on http://seadragon.com/view/4bj and especially visible because of the nature of the image (keep your eyes trained on the blue and purple bits). Did you tone down the JPEG quality of the tiles to solve the memory problems on larger images?

Also, in any configuration of deepzoomtools are tiles comprising smaller resolutions of a given image derived from the preceding zoom level (assuming working from largest to smallest), thus compounding JPEG artifacting or is every zoom level's tiles generated fresh from the initial image? – Nathanael Lawrence, on October 30, 2009 11:58

Hey there, mate. Sorry for the troubles. I've seen this one a few times recently as well. The following is part of two different Photosynth team members' responses rolled into one:

A0000004 “Missing Collection Entry”
That means we had an issue getting the synth record into our database. It happens at the end of uploading photos, when the server and client are in disagreement on the status of the uploaded files.

The best advice I can give you is to just retry the synth. Yes, the calculation will have to be done over again (sorry!), but most all of the photos should have been successfully uploaded and only a couple should have to re-upload, so hopefully your second go should be a fair bit shorter than this last time.

I, too, would consider this a huge value-add, considering the mapping applications of Seadragon, even if no other use cases.

For other use cases, though, a photo sharing site where a flickr|facebook | iPhoto|Windows Live Photo Gallery|Picasa face tagging system was implemented in tandem with a Photosynth or HD View linking|bookmarking system, the result would be great for zooming to people's faces and rotating the image so that their face appears right side up for the dynamic closeup.

EndBringer42, can you confirm that you've got all subdomains of photosynth.net unblocked as well as Martin describes above? – Nathanael Lawrence, on October 17, 2009 22:00

Would you mind if we take a look at the finished product, James, or are the photos too private? – Nathanael Lawrence, on October 14, 2009 01:33

For anyone else that simply wants to report an image that you think shouldn't be listed publicly (i.e. it is offensive or against the terms of use), simply use the 'Report abuse' link below the image on Seadragon.com. – Nathanael Lawrence, on October 14, 2009 01:32