Cycling 74 » Topic: RSS feeds

RSS feeds

johnsoncraigsbc — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:33:20 +0000

I am looking at creating a patch that takes images from a website and cycles through them really quickly, outputting them as a cycling images, video type installation.

I have no idea where to start with max msp in terms of getting the images from the internet, so any help would be awesome.

Re: RSS feeds

johnsoncraigsbc — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:02:59 +0000

I can’t really use the Jweb object because it loads far too slowly for the purpose I need it for.

This could potentially work with FTP as well, drawing images from a folder on a server?

Re: RSS feeds

Luke Hall — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:24:21 +0000

I think that [jit.uldl] can access files via FTP although I’ve never used it to do that.

Re: RSS feeds

johnsoncraigsbc — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:50:59 +0000

Yes, I’ve been playing around with that. Not too sure how to get cycling images out of it though. I wonder if Java could be of use here, although I’ve never touched on Java before.

Re: RSS feeds

johnsoncraigsbc — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:49:44 +0000

So basically my patch needs to download images in a folder from an FTP server into a folder on my computer. Then my patch needs to choose randomly an image from that folder to display.

This is my patch so far. The two problems are: downloading not just single files from my FTP but a whole folder of images, and displaying the images in that download folder randomly.

– Pasted Max Patch, click to expand. –

Re: RSS feeds

seejayjames — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:47:00 +0000

Don’t know if you can get a whole folder at once, but you can definitely automate getting the files if you have access to the names. once you have the files it’s pretty easy to populate a dropdown menu with the names, then [prepend] the local filepath to the images so they can be loaded up.

Probably you could skip a step and do a [prepend prefix] to a umenu that accesses the files remotely, I’m not sure. Try doing this locally to see how it works with a folder of files (if you haven’t messed with this feature yet), then see if you can do it remotely, it might be possible. I’m sure it would work with a shared/mounted drive, but via FTP access I don’t know… maybe you could work with it somehow.

For another angle, dig into [jit.str.regexp], there’s a cool example subpatch which shows how to grab all the images off a webpage (like a Google Image search) and store them locally. Again, once you’ve done this, a umenu to access them (and send random index numbers to the umenu for display) is easy.

Re: RSS feeds

Luke Hall — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:39:10 +0000

Unsurprisingly it seems you can’t download a folder via FTP however as long as you know the names of the files you’re looking for this shouldn’t be a problem. Setting up a naming convention would probably be a good idea, ie: pic_1, pic_2 etc then you could use [sprintf] and a [counter] triggered by the completion of the previous download. A [sel download] on the right outlet of [jit.uldl] would do it. You could also keep a text file somewhere in your FTP directory with a list of all the currently uploaded file names. If you do this then you could let multiple users upload photos to your project.