GeoPal wrote:Ok, this is a test for 8k jpgs, around 5 mb each. Works on windows and Android fine- just upload the equirect and all set. I will test multires and single res cube files to see how it feels on mobile.
Barcelona bay sunrise walk
Cool. Works great on Mac. Also, I see your server has no problems in resizing 8192 px images, so it works nicely on devices that only support 4096 px also. Image resized to 4096 on your server ~2.2MB:
panomagic.eu/render/w4096/360/Barcelona/b18b_8.jpg
GeoPal wrote:Krpano single level output from 5.12Mb file - 15 files, 3.90 Mb
Krpano multilevel output from 5.12 Mb file - 309 files, 12 Mb
Cool, although these figures don't mean much to me. You can't really "save space" for any kind of panoramas, unless you use lower resolution source. If it's about amount of files, clearly equirect is the winner.
GeoPal wrote:p.s. krpano has a nice feature- you can have centralized player files and configure the xml to the path of the player, so you can update very fast a new version of the player and upload less files on the server- thus you don't need a dedicated player for each of the hundreds of panos.
Loading the XML itself would require at least PHP+XML before it can even read any values from the XML, in which case perhaps it could load "javascript" from another path. But then, why not just set the app to always load latest version from CDN like X3 does? You would still need to manually edit XML file for all of your projects if you update the "player" in a single location. Of course, panoramas added to X3 would all be updated automatically when you update X3. Also, for the panorama "app" we spoke of, you can use a single player to access different sources per url param ?file=equirect.jpg ?path=cube_path/ ?config=pano.json, so you would really only need one player in a single location.
GeoPal wrote:For now the quickest way is upload 8k equirectangular image. My only concern is the speed of loading the pano on mobile connections. Balance is never easy :)
If you want a single-level cube panorama of the same quality as an 8k equirect image, we are speaking
6 tiles X 2048/2048 px. Total file size of these tiles would be at least the same as the 8k equirect image (if same quality), although single files always load faster, because there is less requests/latency and better compression. Also, to fulfill a single field-of-view, 5 out of 6 tiles (left, center, right, top, bottom) would need to load anyway ... Thus, I don't see much advantage in terms of loading.
If you want optimal loading on all devices, multi-level cube is the clear winner. It would target a single level depending on screen abilities, and it would load images progressively, and it would only require perhaps 30-40% of the levels tiles to fulfill initial view.