I am not sure how many peo­ple down­loaded, looked at, or are actively using that Sur­veil­lance­Saver alpha 0 that made the rounds a few weeks ago. It seems that enough peo­ple are using it that the cam­eras are over­loaded (slash­dot­ted, dugg-effected, whathaveyou) and can only inter­mit­tently serve up images.

The way the screen­saver is coded, it requests an image every sec­ond, then dis­plays the results of that to the screen. If the request was not ful­filled (from the cam­era being flooded with oth­ers’ requests and unable to process yours), it would dis­play a black screen for that sec­ond. This would result in choppy video–with the image cut­ting out for a sec­ond every few seconds.

I made a minor mod­i­fi­ca­tion to the screen­saver that effec­tively caches the last known-good image. With this enhance­ment, the pic­ture you are look­ing at may be a lit­tle stale, if there were sev­eral bad requests in a row, but you should never get a black screen (unless, of course, the cam­era you are look­ing through is in the dark.)

http://netninja.com/files/ssaver/SurveillanceSaver_alpha_0a.qtz.zip

Like the orig­i­nal, this is under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Code

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Tagged as: composer, quartz, quartzcomposer, screensaver, surveillance, surveillancesaver, webcams