Best quality and Functionality, QTVR or cube faces?

[andrew22222]

Hi,

I'm trying to find the best way of displaying large amounts of panoramas, 400+ on a website. Would like to sort out one good method now and stick to it.

I'm setting up a template page but am unsure which method to use for the best quality and functionality, QTVR or cube faces? Previously I always used pano2qtvr to create both a qtvr and a flash pano file straight from a 10000 X 5000 equirectangular image and both versions were approx 900kb each. Neither were designed for full screen viewing. If I wanted to put up a separate full screen version, that file was approx 3mb and was nice and sharp.

Does the FPP display both QTVR or cube faces the same or is one better than the other? There's certainly less files with a single qtvr but then that single file will have to weigh in at a minimum of 2.5mb just in case the user clicks on 'view full screen'. Nothing worse than seeing a blurry stretched version.

Look forward to any replies

Andrew

[zleifr]

I prefer the cube faces, so far QTVRs load slowly for me if they have a preview, and give me the beach ball of death on a mac for a while loading....

I think that quality is the same. You might see if you feel happy with smaller cubefaces fullscreen, as the overhead for that size pano may be a bit big for a lot of users cpus.

My $.02.

Ask Scott Witte to reply, I bet he would know.

[Virtualguide]

Hi,
I think this would be important information for all of You:

I used .mov files and had no problem ... But after some time I noticed that some of my clients have problems to display panos - they have fast internet connection, the pano loaded very fast till 98% and then stopped... I could not find why? They have four computers in the office - the same... Till now it was no problem - on dual core Intel or AMD machines with more then 512MB RAM. I tested it on my 2 years old HP 6110nc notebook with Centrino 1,4GHz and 512MB RAM (XP Prof. SP2) and it worked. However on their two Acer Aspire 4500 and 3000 it stopped on 96 or 98%. Both notebooks have 512 MB RAM. The other desktop PCs have only 256 MB RAM so the same as I expected. I could not find where is the problem - I removed one 256 MB RAM module from my testing HP and now - the same problem!
So I tried to experiment with cube faces - And what do You think???
YES: NO PROBLEM!!! Even with 256MB RAM - no problem. 4 computers of my clients - no problem now!
I think that there is some problem with decoding of .mov format to cube faces and oldier/cheaper/weaker computers have problem with that.

Conclusion: I RECOMMEND TO USE CUBE FACES !!!
(I think we use often very good machines for producing panos - 2cores or 4cores processor, min. 1-2 GB RAM many use 4GB, some of us use Mac OSX, etc... , my clients have many times Pentium III, 256 MB RAM is very usual some of them have 512 and from 10 clients only 1 had 1 GB RAM... )

[Scott Witte]

Andrew,

Denis said some time ago that cube faces were the most efficient. I vaguely recall that cube strips take some 30% more RAM and a somewhat more processing time to open.

With v2.2 Denis said the following:
QTVR cube panoramas are loading without any quality reduction. And no suprflous resources is taken. Parsing and loading are very smooth (especially for multi tiles panoramas). QTVR cubes are now really recommended format for Flash Panorama Player. Only .swf format can be more promising in future.

Also, I need to note that Flash Panorama Player loads and parses .mov files several times faster then QuickTime player itself. You can test it yourself, do not forget to remove bandwidth restrictions in XML file.

The last step will be hardware support in Flash Player 9. Adobe promised to release it this autumn (beta version is available already). I will publish a special plugin to support this future for v2.2.

and later:

No conversion, use mov directly, one file is more useful then 6
And it works faster than pano stripe.

Virtualguide's experience suggests that separate cube faces is still more resource efficient than MOV files and will slightly extend your audience at the low end of the computer capability. So you have to ask if the benefits of one vs 6 files per pano is worth the trade off. Does your client even want to target an audience with such limited systems or can they safely assume their audience is better equipped? My minimum testing system is a horrid Compaq 800MHz P3 w/384MB RAM and onboard video that uses 32MB of that system RAM, running WinXP which eats RAM compared to previous systems. It is slow but works. If I dropped to 256MB RAM....? If I dropped to an old Pentium with 128MB RAM I doubt anything would run.

One thought about your file size concern: you can load the smaller version first and only switch to using the heavyweight if someone wants better quality in full screen. That can be a switch in your navigation bar. Check one of Cameleer's last posts for a link to his sight where he does exactly that. Brilliant!

[ericob]

In my limited testing of QTVR files, it takes far, far, FAR longer to load them than does loading cube faces.

I think that native support for QTVR format files is a fabulous idea, but (in my experience) it sure seems currently to be at an "Alpha" level of development. :(

[Stephmw]

One question about cube faces... are there linux-able tools for generating these from partial panoramas? I'd really like to get my partials a little crisper ;-)

[Scott Witte]

In my limited testing of QTVR files, it takes far, far, FAR longer to load them than does loading cube faces.

Ericob,

If you are seeing that kind of difference I feel pretty sure you are using loaderStreamed=1 and Firefox. Are you? As an example, with loaderStreamed=1 the load time for a MOV file from the HD was 20 seconds in FF and 4 in IE, including the HTML overhead of creating the browser window etc. Without loaderStreamed the load time was the same between FF and IE. The load time between cube faces and MOV files was essentially the same as long as loaderStreamed wasn't used.

Because of the HUGE negative effect of loaderStreamed on FF it is simply, absolutely irresponsible to use, IMO.

[andrew22222]

Thanks very much for the replies. I guess I was hoping it was QTVR that was the better quality as I am use to using them and have a good work flow. I did read more posts and it is early stages incorporating qtvr's into FPP. Bit of a heavy learning curve all this anyway without having problems loading a quicktime movie! Cube faces however are just as easy to make so I'll get down to some testing and see what size fits both projections well.

I took a look at Cameleer's website. I'd visited it before via a link on the panotools NG. Very good idea. I have the slideshow software from another sites gallery and didn't even think to add html links to the thumbnails. Doesn't really show a smaller files size version first though as it is a panning image effect. Still a good idea though and incredible panoramas.

Andrew