Like a Bird on a Wire(shark)...

Over recent years, libferris has been using Qt to mount some Web stuff as a filesystem. I have a subclass of QIODevice which acts as an intermediary to allow one to write to a std::ostream and stream that data to the Web, over a POST for example. For those interested, that code is in Ferris/FerrisQt.cpp of the tarball. It's a bit of a shame that Qt heavy web code isn't in KIO or that the two virtual filesystems are not closer linked, but I digress.

I noticed a little while ago that cp to vimeo://upload didn't work anymore. I had earmarked that for fixing and recently got around to making that happen. It's always fun interacting with these Web APIs. Over the time I've found that Flickr sets the bar for well documented APIs that you can start to use if you have any clue about making GET and POST etc. At one stage google had documented their API in a way that you could never use it. I guess they have fixed that by now, but it did sort out the pretenders from those two could at least sniff HTTP and were determined to win. The vimeo documentation IIRC wasn't too bad when I added support to upload, but the docs have taken a turn for the worst it seems. Oh, one fun tip for the young players, when one API call says "great, thanks, well done, I've accepted your call" and then a subsequent one says "oh, a strange error has happened", you might like to assume that the previous call might not have been so great after all.

So I started tinkering around, adding oauth to the vimeo signup, and getting the getTicket call to work. Having getTicket working meant that my oauth signed call was accepted too. I then was then faced with the upload of the core data (which is normally done with a rather complex streaming POST), and the final I'm done, make it available call. On vimeo that last call seems to be two calls now, first a VerifyChunks call and then a Complete call.

So, first things first. To upload you call getTicket which gives you an endpoint that is an HTTP URL to send the actual video data to, as well as an upload ticket to identify the session. If you try to post to that endpoint URL and the POST converts the CGI parameters using multipart/form-data with boundaries into individual Content-Disposition: form-data elements, you loose. You have to have the ticket_id in the URL after the POST text in order to upload. One little trap.

So then I found that verifyChunks was returning Error 709 Access to the chunk list failed. And that was after the upload had been replied to with "OK. Thanks for the upload.". Oddly, I also noticed that the upload of video data would hang from time to time. So I let the shark out of the pen again, and found that vimeo would return it's "yep were done, all is well" response to the HTTP POST call at about 38-42kb into the data. Not so great.

Mangling the vimeo.php test they supply to upload with my oauth and libferris credentials I found that the POST had a header Expect: 100-continue. Right after the headers were sent vimeo gave the nod to continue, and then the POST body was sent. I assume that just ploughing through and giving the headers followed by the body confused the server end and thus it just said "yep, ok, thanks for the upload" and dropped the line. Then of course forgot the ticket_id because there was no data for it, so the verifyChunks got no chunk list and returned the strange error it did. mmm, hindsight!

So I ended up converting from the POST the newly available PUT method for upload. They call that their "streaming API" even though you can of course stream to a POST endpoint. You just need to frame the parameters and add the MIME tailer to the POST if you want to stream a large file that way. Using PUT I was then able to verify my chunks (or the one single chunk in fact) and the upload complete method worked again.

In the end I've added oauth to my vimeo mounting, many thanks to the creators of the QOAuth library!

Images from n810 to the Web

New debs allowing you to copy to flickr, 23hq, vimeo, youtube etc from the n810 are available. The next step is closer integration, tapping into the "send to" menu to let you send any image file to these places. Hey, its just a filesystem now ;)

One interesting possibility is using the n810 to shuttle images from a digital camera to the net. This gets around the vendor lock-in that might be present on your camera because the n810 just grabs the images from the cam and then shuttles them onward to wherever.

I also updated libferris to allow you to authenticate from the console, just the ticket to let you set things up over ssh with your desktop browser.

OK, for maemo, check the repository and you'll want ferris, libferris, and libferrisui at least. Version 1.3.6.
If you get into dependency trouble, see the build order to get an idea of the tree. Sorry its a bit hard to get on the device, hopefully stuff will move into extras in time.

Anyone who has used desktop flickr tools, you'll know about the whole authenticate before you buy thing. The below commands setup 23hq and copy an image over to it.

$ ferris-capplet-auth --list-auth-sites
...
flickr
23hq
...
$ ferris-capplet-auth --auth-with-site 23hq
...
Grant Auth following URL...

http://www.23hq.com/services/auth/?api_key=...

Then press return to continue...
<Open above link in browser, grant auth, hit return>

Done...

$ ferriscp -av 26082009071.jpg 23hq://me/upload

Hopefully things will become easier in the future: installation, setup etc. Of course, streaming from the webcam to youtube will rock, but baby steps as they say.