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An alternative way to pump lots of webcam frames was to use multipart-MIME responses. That way, there was only one HTTP request and the response just streamed JPEG images, one after the other. No need to break any specifications to get full network usage.


Yes, we did that too (on Netscape, IE did not do multipart for the longest time and when it did it at first was quite buggy).


I'd forgotten the pain of trying to get IE to work with this! I can see how the technique in the article could be a good workaround.

ISTR some webcam software that would fall back to a java applet (that would parse the multipart MIME) on IE. Anything is preferable to that though!


Yes, but we did everything we could to stay away from things like java, downloads and plug-ins. Our mantra was 'it just has to work with whatever the user already has'.

And there always was a way, even if sometimes it required some - for want of a better word ;) - unorthodox methods.


Reminds me of 'websockets over GIF' https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets


Hehe, that's brilliant.




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