Video loading Delay and Spherical Hotspot Projection

  • I'm a photojournalist with The Edmonton Journal in Canada and I absolutely love Krpano for telling stories. Especially for 360-degree video. I wrote a blog post about how I shoot 360-degree video here

    http://punkoryan.com/2011/02/08/sho…hd-hero-cameras

    I am currently working on a 360-degree interview video with politicians for a provincial election.

    The idea is for the user to feel like they are having coffee with all the political leaders and they can ask them questions.

    This time I used a Canon 5D with an 8mm lens and I filmed each person separately in different chairs. I then stitched the videos together by breaking them down into individual frames and stitching them with PTgui.

    Here is an example with me in the chairs.
    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31103925/zke…ion/scenes.html

    Here is the XML
    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31103925/zke…tion/scenes.xml

    The video works great when played locally on my computer but when you view the panorama off of a server there is a loading delay between videos.

    I've set preload="false" but there is still a few seconds of black screen before you see a video. I encoded the videos in H264 and enabled "Fast Start" in Quicktime when I encoded them.

    Problem #1
    When you launch a spherical video, the screen goes blank for a few seconds while the video loads and then the video plays.

    Question #1.
    Is there any way to prevent the screen from going black for a few seconds when you launch the next spherical video?

    An idea I have is to take the first frame of video and make that a still image.
    Make that still image load as a spherical panorama "background layer" that loads as a preview first and remains there.
    Then when a new spherical video is loading the viewer can still see the still image "background layer" instead of a blank screen.
    Is that possible?
    How could that work?
    Can I load a sphere still image and a sphere video at the same time?

    Problem #2

    I need the video to work on both desktop and on iPhone and iPad.

    I know that the iPad cannot play spherical 360-degree video and can only play flat or distorted video hotspots in H264 format.

    So far my plan is for devices="flash" (Desktop computers) I will have spherical videos and for devices="html5" (mobile) I will load a Cubical still image of the scene and then have video hotspots where the people are talking.

    Watch http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31103925/zkeep/krpanoforums-election/scenes.html on an iPad and you'll see.

    I've tried cropping the piece of video I need and placing that video as a hotspot where I have a person talking. But I can't get the video to perfectly line up because the hotspot isn't distorted the same as the background cube image is distorted.

    Question #2
    Is there any way to distort a video hotspot exactly the same way as a sphere or cubical panorama so that it looks proper and lines up with the background properly?

    What is the best way to do this?

    Or. If you can't distort it the same then what is the best way to get it close-enough?

    Thank you!

  • Hi,

    Question #1.
    Is there any way to prevent the screen from going black for a few seconds when you launch the next spherical video?

    okay, that's a bit complicated - a possibility might be:

    - use only one videoplayer plugin for all scenes
    - that means keep=true for it
    - and when clicking the button for the next scene:

    1. call freezeview(true);
    2. set the onvideoready event of the videoplayer plugin to "loadscene(...); freezeview(false);"
    3. then start playing the new video by a "playvideo(...)" call to the videoplayer plugin

    Question #2
    Is there any way to distort a video hotspot exactly the same way as a sphere or cubical panorama so that it looks proper and lines up with the background properly?

    getting the settings for a pixel perfect alignment would be possible when the video hotspot area would be inside a cube face, see here:
    Example/Tutorial - interactive area in the pano (aligned distorted hotspot)

    best regards,
    Klaus

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