CamCollect

2 - Fixed a problem capturing streaming cams at http://www.peepholecam.com/ due to a minor difference in the way that separate images were separated.

3 - Fixed a long term problem with streaming video that meant every other streamed picture was lost and an issue that failed to reset the slow download timer after each new image, so causing stream capture to stop prematurely. More information is now written into the Diagnostic Log window showing the volume of streamed data downloaded, which would have made these more obvious a long time ago.

4 - If a site is temporarily disabled, this is now written to the main Log Window, ditto if it capture is re-enabled.

5 - Increased the maximum capture interval from 99 to 999 minutes. The fix in the previous release only increased it from 59 to 99 minutes.

2 - Fixed a rare problem where a web site came back with a specific sized block of data which overflowed an internal session buffer, causing all subsequent requests using that session to fail with 'Cannot change LocalAddr if not closed' or similar messages.

3 - Increased the maximum capture interval from 59 to 999 minutes.

2 - There is a new thumbnail images window that can be displayed beside the normal web cam image window. The main Windows menu now provides eight different arrangements. If anyone has better arrangement suggestions, please send a compressed screen capture. A right click menu in the new thumbnail window offers five different thumbnail sizes ranging from 107x80 to 320x240, and adjusting the width of the window will determine how many columns of thumbnails are displayed, dynamically.

The main view menu has new options to show or hide the Thumbnails window, and determine whether new captured images should be displayed immediately as thumbnails. The thumbnails window right click menu has an Auto Scroll option, that specifies whether the window should scroll down so that new thumbnails are always visible, or remain stationary to allow new thumbnails to be viewed later. To look at thumbnails for a specific webcam site, select the site in the Pictures window, then right click and take Show Thumbnails. Clicking on any thumbnail image will display that image full size in the Pictures window. The Thumbnails window right click menu has an option Reset Thumbnails which will clear the window and restart showing thumbnails from all sites, if enabled.

Beware there are disk space implications for a lot of thumbnails, To allow scrolling back and forward in the window, the images are saved in a file created in the windows temporary directory. For instance, 5,000 160x120 thumbnails caused the file to grow to 330 Mbytes (but the file is emptied when thumbnails are cleared). If you leave CamCollect capturing for long periods and are short of disk space, untick 'New Thumbnails' and just look at them on a per site basis.

3 - CamCollect has been migrated to the latest version of the Delphi development environment, and a new image library introduced. This means the image editing options have all changed and now include some more flexible editing options (but currently gamma correction and printing are missing). In View/Edit Images, several image enhancement menu options have been replaced by a single 'Image Processing' option (also available on a new button) which displays a tabbed dialog with the specific options. There is also a new crop button.

4 - On Windows NT4 and better, the log and debug windows now contain rather more historic information than with Win9x.

5 - When run unregistered, CamCollect2 no longer brands each captured image. Instead, continuous and automatic capture will only last for five minutes, after which all capture options are disabled except for 'Single Once'. When a registration key is entered, CamCollect2 should be restarted and all functionality will become available.

6 - Streaming video from www.camarades.com cams can again be captured. Beware Camarades seem to change streaming format periodically. Also that capturing streaming video with the new thumbnail window enabled may use a lot of disk space due to the large number of images.

7 - CamCollect2 now correctly recognises corrupted images. There are options in Preferences that determine whether bad images should be displayed and saved anyway, and/or if they should be immediately retried (up to three times).

8 - Made various cosmetic changes so that all the windows text can be seen correctly when using Windows 120 dpi (large) fonts. Sorry, should have checked font sizing years ago. The splash screen has gone, mainly because the image has got lost, but it was horrible anyway.

9 - Please note it is no longer possible to officially support CamCollect2 on Windows 95 or Windows NT4 prior to service pack 4. This is because the current version of the Borland Delphi compiler is not supported on Windows 95 - Microsoft has also stopped supporting Windows 95. In practice, CamCollect2 has been working OK until this release. However Borland has now made a change to Delphi that may cause an error 'missing export OLEAUT32.DLL VarNot' on Windows 95 retail and NT4 prior to service pack 4. This error will go away when the Microsoft D COM 1.2 upgrade is installed. There is no problem with Windows OSR2 (version B) or later, or with Windows 98 or ME.

2 - Windows XP is now called that, rather than Windows 2000.

3 - If the new 'Period time location' option was set to 'site time', in some circumstance CamCollect made continuous attempts to collect from that site with the collection interval ignored.

2 - Improved the View/Edit Image window, providing better means of browsing images. The zoom level may now be specified directly by percentage, in addition to the up/down buttons. New Next/Prev (Skip) buttons allow skipping a specified number of images and a button to stop a slide show (in addition to clicking any other button). Setting the skip as four and clicking the next or previous buttons will view every fifth images, useful when images are unchanged for long periods (at night). The slide show facility may now be used to move forwards or backwards through an image directory, with the update interval (previously fixed at one second) now adjustable between 100ms and 5 seconds.

3 - Added support for another method of image protection, as used by numerous webcams indexed at http://spotlife.com/ where the image page uses a session cookie that needs to be supplied with the image request. To set-up a Spotlife site, find the image page URL which will be similar to http://spotlife.com/users2/???/webcam/ where ??? is the owner (ignore stuff after webcam), the image URL will then be http://spotlife.com/users2/???/webcam/pic/image.jpg, and add the word 'cookie' to the Search Tag field. CamCollect will then read the image once, keep the cookie, and get the image.

4 - Now supporting another technique for dynamic URLs, where the HTML page is compressed using GZIP (Cykakam). The page is first decompressed before the URL is located.

5 - A new option has been added to Preferences, General, 'User Agent' is a string sent to the web server with every request to identify the type of browser. It defaults to 'Mozilla/4.7 [en] (Win98; I)' but it's conceivable that this string could be trapped by a web server to stop CamCollect (and Netscape 4.7) collecting images, so it's now configurable.

6 - Fixed a problem when using the command line option 'dun=none' that CamCollect exited if a DUN connection was started and stopped, when DUN should have been ignored completely.

7 - Minor fix for dynamic URL checking, where the HTML page does not contain proper headers.

8 - Various general stability improvements to the winsock stuff.

Sessions no longer become 'stuck', not sure if this is down to improved winsock error handling or Windows 2000.

9 - A Windows 2000 bug has been fixed when viewing images through View/Edit Image, when the files are on an NTFS formatted volume and either encrypted or with content indexing disabled.

2 - If the 'Show Most Recent' option is not selected, the current imageis now updated correctly without needing to click another tab first.

3 - The 'Scrolling Site Names' option is now restored correctly when CamCollect starts up.

2 - In the Multiple Site Change window, the different columns in the list of sites may now be sorted by clicking on the appropriate header. This will considerably ease multiple site changes, by allowing all disabled or specific priority sites to be sorted together.

3 - It is again possible to view read only images.

2 - CamCollect is now able to collect images from URLs that that incorporate a dynamic session id. A request is first made to access the camera which returns the session id, and this is then added to the picture URL. The session id typically expires after a few minutes. This technique is used by the Webview Livescope server used by Canon for several zoom/pannable web cams (note CamCollect will not allow camera control). The URL of the request page is entered in the Search Tag field followed by a space and 'id=', while the Image URL has the numbers following the 'id=' removed. When accessed, the id returned is inserted into the URL after the 'id='. Note that locating the URLs may not be trivial, since the browser normally uses Java to display the image. But Magenta Systems may be able to help with URL location (using a proxy to watch the traffic). Some Webview cams also have a static URL, which may be found by clicking the button to the left of the zoom bar.

3 - The last selected cam site is now correctly restored when CamCollect is started, rather than the last site accessed before a release some time last year when it stopped being saved.

4 - A minor improvement has been made to the algorithm used to find dynamic URLs, to increase the number of sites accessible.

5 - An improvement has been made for proxy servers incorrectly returning a 200 result code for a not modified image, so that an ‘empty file’ error does not occur.

6 - When an ‘empty file’ or ‘file size mismatch’ error occurs, CamCollect now only does three retries (10 seconds apart) to get the file, to avoid wasted access attempts when a corrupted file has been left on the server.

7 - If a ‘view image’ error occurs, CamCollect will now retry the download up to three times. This error usually means the image file was changed on the web server while it was being downloaded. Better web servers avoid this problem.