Landsat7 - Austria at level 5 and 6

[canosso]

Hello,
I downloaded Austria (=small country in Europe) at the highest resolution. Could be seen on the image below, the larger red dot in the middle. (Thanks to Nowak for the map.)

http://proxy.ww.xpam.de/img/visual-bm-eu.jpg

The whole country would have total a size of 2.67 GB data and zipped only 1.54 GB. This file does not include the data which is already part of Alps over France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria (http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/cache.html), this file should be downladed too to view Austria. It would be 3 files including elevation data files:
430.156.231 austrialevel5.zip (http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel5.zip)
612.142.133 austrialevel6-1.zip (http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel6-1.zip) (below a latitude of 47.5)
619.923.688 austrialevel6-2.zip (http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel6-2.zip) (above a latitude of 47.5)

canosso

[TomServo]

Talk to TheBeansprout about uploading to his server.

[Lucian]

Before you start downloading, this dataset is not any better than the
Landsat server already offers by default to any WW user, as it was created by
downloading data from that server.
The one and only difference is that you get the whole Austria at once, including
all the areas that you will never look at.

Lucian

[Beansprout]

Like Lucian says there's not much point, but PM me if you want to, I'm more than happy to host for you :)

Twobeds.com was down earlier for maintenance (well, a script kiddie sent a 38mbit/sec packetflood....) but all is well now. :)

[canosso]

Hello,
thanks to TheBeansprout, who provided space for the files. The first file is already available at his server:
http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel5.zip (=Austria at level 5)

Greets

canosso

[buachaille]

Originally posted by Lucian@Dec 16 2004, 03:59 AM
The one and only difference is that you get the whole Austria at once, including
all the areas that you will never look at.
Lucian
Quoted post


Lucian,

Have you considered other use cases ? Take those without an internet connection, or the inclination to wait many hours as your local area downloads one square at a time. For example, getting a copy of a DVD that a friend has burned for you which instantly contains your entire country is considerably better than the alternatives. Or those with the ability to download large files overnight, or even over a day or two, will suit a lot of people better since you can grab a lot of data without having to visit every place in advance. Since the download is unattended, many people will find this preferable.

Once we all have blindingly fast connections and are permanently online, sure, the server advantages become apparent. Especially where the amounts of data become unfeasible for local storage.

As an example, I can get all of Scotland's Landsat7 false-color data at all resolutions on half of a DVD without compression. It took a couple of weeks on and off to download all this and there are still gaps here and there since I used WW instead of a script. It takes less than an hour and close to zero effort to run off a copy for my relatives. And now every place within the region I've grabbed loads quickly every time. The quality of experience is markedly better.

[Lucian]

Your example is perfect. What are the chances that what you downloaded, even it has all the tiles for a given area, are exactly what somebody else wants to look at? Not what they would have, but what they really look at, at least one single time!
Other than an organized activity, such as a geography lesson, where many users have to look at the same area, I don't think the small data-pack has much merit.
Your cache contains what you need, and of course it saves you time. Would work great on a CD/DVD, especially if it does not need to be copied to the hard drive. Having to download a large cache pack and then install it, especially with with a slow connection is about the same as using WW and the server out of the box!

As an alternative to downloading this cache, I proposed a caching proxy that uses a very efficient jpg/png format to hold tiles. The disk usage is about a quarter of the space required by the WW cache format, and it doesn't require packing/zip! I have even uploaded whole world coverage at 500m and 250m (4x4, or 16 times more data than the tiled 1Km blue marble), it fits on a CD!!
And since it is meant to be a web proxy for WW, it could be shared by a group of users, making it even better for "geography lessons". All this without any changes in WW.
I've even asked Chris to modify WW to be able to use this data format directly, without having to do a whole web proxy installation. It should be trivial, just an alternate source of data, in the exact format sent by the servers. Obviously, it was not considered a priority. Better to build a whole new mosaic and server (http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/forums/index.php?showtopic=916)

Lucian


Originally posted by buachaille@Dec 17 2004, 02:25 PM
Lucian,

Have you considered other use cases ? Take those without an internet connection, or the inclination to wait many hours as your local area downloads one square at a time. For example, getting a copy of a DVD that a friend has burned for you which instantly contains your entire country is considerably better than the alternatives. Or those with the ability to download large files overnight, or even over a day or two, will suit a lot of people better since you can grab a lot of data without having to visit every place in advance. Since the download is unattended, many people will find this preferable.

Once we all have blindingly fast connections and are permanently online, sure, the server advantages become apparent. Especially where the amounts of data become unfeasible for local storage.

As an example, I can get all of Scotland's Landsat7 false-color data at all resolutions on half of a DVD without compression. It took a couple of weeks on and off to download all this and there are still gaps here and there since I used WW instead of a script. It takes less than an hour and close to zero effort to run off a copy for my relatives. And now every place within the region I've grabbed loads quickly every time. The quality of experience is markedly better.
Quoted post

[buachaille]

Originally posted by Lucian@Dec 18 2004, 05:33 PM
Your example is perfect. What are the chances that what you downloaded, even it has all the tiles for a given area, are exactly what somebody else wants to look at? Not what they would have, but what they really look at, at least one single time!
...
Lucian
Quoted post


For the hillwalking friends I've given disks to, the chances are 100%. I climb hills in Scotland, so do they. The disk contains all the hills in Scotland without having to wait for anything. If I copy the a couple of GB from the disk, they can be instantly impressed and use WW straight away to look at routes and such-like. The wasted disk space with the places they'll never visit is an acceptable loss. Plus if they do become WW addicts and the cache works as advertised, the unvisited places will in time work their way out of the cache.

If I was an Austrian citizen, I would as a minimum like complete coverage of Austria. Since it's a few gig of data, then the choice between FTPing canosso's cache file and having it arrived a square at a time is an easy one.

For those living in countries where the whole data set fits on a disk, it's quite possibly the first thing on your wishlist after installing the program. You, on the other hand, in the fortunate position of there being too much data for this to be viable.

I like the sound of your proposal, although compressing/decompressing and reading from CD rather than disk sounds to me like it would be significantly slower, possibly unusably so unless using a real high-spec machine. Especially is the viewpoint is scrolling at the time, I'm not sure mine would keep up :(

[Lucian]

No, CD's would not be slow, neither would decompression. I have a large image browser done this way, with the whole US@60m on a CD, and it works fine with sofware GL, 233MMX CPU and a 4xCD.
As far as I can tell, the slowest part of the download chain is the conversion from image JPG/PNG to textures and from PNGs to TIFFs. Both of those on-disk conversions could be eliminated, libjpeg and libpng are easy to use and do a fine job, direct in memory. For those people with fast 3D card, the choice to use true color textures would make the image quality quite a bit better. If you need compressed textures for performance, I assume there is also some sort of library that can convert from raw data to compressed texture in memory, and that will not be slow.
Using PNGs and JPEGs would also make any "cache downloads" a whole lot smaller.

Lucian

Originally posted by buachaille@Dec 18 2004, 04:16 PM
I like the sound of your proposal, although compressing/decompressing and reading from CD rather than disk sounds to me like it would be significantly slower, possibly unusably so unless using a real high-spec machine. Especially is the viewpoint is scrolling at the time, I'm not sure mine would keep up :(
Quoted post

[Nowak]

Everyting we need is already in DirectX.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default....ngfunctions.asp (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/directx/graphics/reference/d3dx/functions/texture/texturingfunctions.asp)
HRESULT WINAPI D3DXCreateTextureFromFile(
LPDIRECT3DDEVICE9 pDevice,
LPCTSTR pSrcFile,
LPDIRECT3DTEXTURE9 *ppTexture
);

This function supports the following file formats: .bmp, .dds, .dib, .hdr, .jpg, .pfm, .png, .ppm, and .tga.

[canosso]

Hello,
thanks to TheBeansprout, I uloaded the other two files:
austrialevel6-1.zip (http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel6-1.zip) (below a latitude of 47.5)
austrialevel6-2.zip (http://www.twobeds.com/nasa/canosso/austrialevel6-2.zip) (above a latitude of 47.5)

I downloaded the files not only for me, also for my nieces and nephews, who didn't have a fast internet connection. I didn't use a script to download the country, I moved with the mouse but for a Javascript hacker it should be possible to write such a script with two for next loops, moving every 30 minutes to the next spot, first the latitude and then the longitude. Also a random fuction to go a place by accident should be possible.

canosso