On 04/07/13 20:26, Russell Coker wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jul 2013, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Good theory, but the devices in question are taking pictures. We need all the pics so there's not much we can do to reduce the volume of JPEGs.
Well you could reduce the quality of the JPEGs. It's a lossy representation format after all :-)
That's a nice theory, but my client knows what they want in terms of image quality. It's my job to arrange the data transfer.
The pictures are actually of very high quality. We're talking about good DSLRs used for taking the pictures. But it's not the issue for me, I just have to do what my client wants whenever it's possible. I'm sure that they also have some significant Telstra 3G bills. But again it's not my issue, they are paying for the results that they want.
So to restate the facts you've given over the course of this thread: * You have a certain amount of data to transfer, and you are not able to reduce the size of this data. * The data is generated faster than can be uploaded over 3G, even including some buffering to local storage to allow for uploads during quieter periods. * The devices are often in remote areas with only a single 3G carrier (Telstra). You cannot load-share over multiple mobile networks. 4G will not be available either. The way I see it, you have to either reduce the size of the data or increase the capacity of the network link, but you seem to have ruled those options out. I really think you might have to give a little on the data reduction strategy. Have you considered using alternative image compression algorithms? ie. Instead of JPEG, look at fractal or wavelet compression? Those will be more CPU intensive, but reduce the final size, I think. Are your images fairly similar to each other? If so, could you use a video codec and treat them like film frames? x264 compression can maintain a pretty high level of quality with enough bandwidth.