The new movie export menu makes it easier to set the exact scaling of the area you are interested in, and the processing itself is now performed on the graphics card using OpenGL:

The SDO Cutout Service plug-in allows you to request science-quality image data from the SDO/AIA and HMI instruments for the region of interest and time range selected in JHelioviewer:

In the future we will try and take measures to keep this from happening again. The last couple of days have made us look at the services we provide in a whole new way, thanks to the huge interest from you, our users, and we are grateful for that. We are constrained by our resources, so we may not be able to process many more movies each minute any time soon, but what we can do is make it easier for users to find other movies that are out there that have already been made. Thousands of movies have been made by users on Helioviewer.org, but right now there is no simple way to search through those movies and find the ones you are interested in. Further, we will also take some measures to make the users more aware of what the current wait time is before they submit a movie request, and also provide them with an option to cancel the request if they decide they do not want to wait for the movie. All of this will make it easier for you to get to the movies you want.

We apologize to all of the users who have queued movies during the last couple days that did not get processed. If you are still interested in making a movies please go ahead and queue it up again. Hopefully we will not have to take such extreme measures again. Thanks to you all for your patience.

Try it out! If you have any comments or suggestions, or run into any problems, report a bug or feature request.

RELEASE NOTES:

Helioviewer.org 2.2.0 is a major release including a number of stability and performance improvements, as well as a large amount of bug fixes. The main focus of this release is the recently added movie and screenshot creation capabilities. A large amount of work has been done to improve the reliability of those features, and also to pave the way for new functionality which will be added in upcoming releases and will be directed at giving users more fine-tuned control over the movie creation process.

We hope to have a stream of the very latest STEREO images very soon. Watch this space!

While Helioviewer.org has offered High-definition H.264 movies for several months now (encoded using the excellent x264 library), the amount of compression used was fairly high. The result of this was very small file sizes (around 1-5MB), but some noticeable compression artifacts; the effect of which was especially noticeable for larger movies.

For example, the below movie was generated on Helioviewer.org several days ago:

Example 1: In-browser movie before update (download video)

A number of changes were made to the H.264 encoding parameters in order to improve the quality, for example, whereas movies were previously generated using a constant variable bit-rate (-b 2048K), the newer movies use a different rate-control method called “Constant Ratefactor (CRF)” in order to achieve a desired level of quality.

Here is an example of a movie created for viewing in the browser using the new code:

Example 2: In-browser movie after update (download video)

What’s more, the “high-quality” download option is now much higher quality than ever before. Previously, when users clicked on the link below in the in-browser movie that says “Click here to download a high-quality version“, what they got was actually the same movie that was already playing in their browser, but packed in a container format compatible with the user’s operating system. With the update this morning, however, the high-quality download link now points to a separate and visibly higher-quality movie from what is shown in the browser. The high-quality option available now is actually a lossless movie, with respect to the underlying JPEG 2000 data archive used by Helioviewer.org.

Example 3: High quality movie after update (download video)

(Note: If you are having trouble viewing the above video, you can download an MP4 version directly from here.)

Of course, nothing comes for free, and that is true in the case of these improvements as well. The improvements made to quality come at the cost of increased movie filesize. For the standard-quality movie that is shown directly in the browser, the filesize has increased from by a factor of around 1.5-10x with the largest files around 50MB each. The real behemoths, however, are the high-quality (lossless) movies which range from around 50-300MB. It’s a lot, but try watching a few of high-quality AIA movies and you won’t ever want to go back again.

Update 2010/12/31: Thanks to Dark_Shikari on #x264 for some help making sense of some of the many rate control options available when encoding using x264.

Try it out! If you have any comments or suggestions, or run into any problems, report a bug or feature request.

Stayed tuned for some exciting new features next week

RELEASE NOTES:

Helioviewer.org 2.1.0 is a major release which includes many new features and a large number of bug fixes. Major features added include: full support for AIA images, on the fly movie and screenshot creation and a custom resource management and queuing system. Other changes include:

New features:

* Overhauled error back-end error handling
* Support for HEK FRM/Event querying
* PHP IMagick used in place of convert when available for better performance (See: http://valokuva.org/?p=40 for more information)
* Custom FFmpeg wrapper used in place of PHPVideoToolkit
* FirePHP support
* Documentation for each back-end module now handled at the module level rather than globally
* IE8 local storage support
* Conversion from tile coordinates to spatial coordinates now handled on front-end
* Removed dependencies on image archive directory structure
* Added a JHelioviewer JNLP generation method so that users can easily jump from Helioviewer.org to JHelioviewer
* Color of image layer timestamps now ranges on a scale from green (near requested time) to red (far from requested time). Absolute difference is used so that it does not matter whether actual image is ahead or behind requested one

Bug fixes:

* Fixed bug #544338 Edge effects for tiles viewed at higher magnification
* Fixed bug #605412 Helioviewer-generated Flash movies degrade in quality as the movie progresses
* Fixed bug #614558 Use of IMagick#extentImage results in images with incorrect dimensions
* Fixed bug #619944 Movie history panel occasionally stays in viewport
* Fixed bug #312205 Sandbox dimensions are too large for C2 and C3 Images
* Fixed bug #383939 Disable tiling when layer is hidden
* Fixed bug #508723 Check to see if data exists for each source, or provide option to disable a data source
* Fixed bug #605398 Improve JPX request cadence optimization for non-evenly distributed data
* Fixed bug #605411 Fullscreen, etc. button tooltips are hidden by movie/screenshot creation dialogs
* Fixed bug #608265 Chrome appends .html on movies
* Fixed bug #610456 FITS header dialog not updated when image is changed
* Fixed bug #645836 shortcuts for time steps “<” or “>” not working
* Fixed bug #535645 Add link to uncompressed JavaScript and CSS for better “view source” function
* Fixed bug #544352 backfill JP2s from SOHO mission up to most recent
* Fixed bug #322857 Sandbox dimensions do not update right away when layers are removed
* Fixed bug #415455 helioviewer logo issues/request

Library updates:

* jQuery imgAreaSelect (0.8 => 0.9.2)
* jQuery jGrowl (1.2.0 => 1.2.4)
* jQuery qTip (1.0 r34 => 1.0 r54)

Contact me if you encounter any problem with the JP2Gen instructions , or with implementing JP2Gen on your local system (or any other part of the wiki). I’d be very happy to get your feedback!