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Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

Wondering how the streaming works. It seems to send a bunch of GIF images which hold the diff from the last frame when something is moving.

The framerate is quite low at the moment, but that's probably because of HN?!

Edit: it also sends full JPEGs of the screen when there's much going on. I believe my JSMPEG[1] would really be a viable alternative for this use-case. Streaming support is in the works :)

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg

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Hi there, COO here. I wrote a good response on this when we were branded as Kickfolio: http://www.quora.com/How-Does-X-Work/How-does-Kickfolio-work.... You're quite right - we stream diff'd GIFs and JPEGs at different times. We did originally try encoding with FFMPEG and other technologies, but surprisingly this works best! We're constantly improving the algorithm. I'm just about to push up another change this weekend :)

While your implementation seems to be quite ingenious, the answer on Quora doesn't explain anything besides "sending frames" and "magic happens".

I would have liked to see a more in-depth explanation, but I understand if you don't want to share it at this point.

;) Quite right - we have two patent applications in the works! So unfortunately I can't provide a whole lot more detail at this point. Feel free to email me though if you're interested to chat offline. Great job with JSMPEG by the way.

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