[gopher] Gopher Live Stream Demonstration

[Iain R. Learmonth]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 20:56:49 -0400
Wolfgang Faust <wolfgangmcq at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 8:50 PM, Iain R. Learmonth <irl at sdf.org> wrote:
> >
> >> > Tested in OmniWeb, it seems it just keeps eating the data and never renders it.
> >> How long did you run OmniWeb for?
> >
> > About 5 minutes. I left it running while I was trying it in lynx.
> Darn. I guess that's at least one client that doesn't work then.
> >
It's a shame, because OmniWeb is generally pretty good for Gopher.

> > The problem I think is that MJPEG relies on MIME being understood to detect boundaries in the stream. AFAIK, there's no way to communicate a MIME type through Gopher. Loading the data into a stream is easy. The trick is going to be doing it in a way that makes sense for Gopher.
> I was under the impression that the 'm' mime-type was used for
> MIME-encoded files, but it seems that it's MBOX files instead. Drat.

It would be handy if there was an item type that read the first line upto the CRLF as a mime type. I believe there was some talk of getting a new Gopher RFC, and I work in a networking research group, but then everyone disappeared? This would have been great to go in there.

> > I think the first experiment will consist of an HTML page with a still and a meta refresh tag. That's nice and simple and makes sure I've got something happening that I can say works.
> That sounds like it might work, though the refresh would be really
> slow and you'd have a lot of TCP overhead reconnecting for each frame.
> >

TCP overhead would be my primary concern there, yes. Having played with UDP multicast video, TCP unicast seems ridiculous. Although I suppose multicast isn't ubiquitous.

> > Gopher has an item type for GIF. I wonder if GIFs can be streamed. That would work maybe.
> GIFs can be animated, though you might run into some trouble if the
> number of frames is defined in the header.
> >

I'm not sure how GIFs work, but I don't see a reason why I couldn't specify an arbitrarily large number of frames if I do have to define one.

> > As a side, sorry if you went to check out the webcam on that page and were disappointed. It's 2am here so there's nothing to see but a dark empty room.
> I guessed as much. There's a little bit of "motion" from the camera
> seeing artifacts. Why are you up at 2AM anyhow?

Porting the Computing Science Society's website to Jekyll so I can use the Markdown sources to automatically generate the Gophersite, reinstalling Debian on one of the research group's servers and listening to tunes. That's what 2am is for.

I got http://irl.unixcab.org/ over to Jekyll and now the same content can be found via Gopher at http://sdf.org/1/users/irl/. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

-- 
Iain R. Learmonth <irl at sdf.org>