Latest news

2 Jul 2004

The Palantir server v2.5.5 is available.
The server now supports the Logitech QuickCam Sphere/Orbit pan/tilt facilities. See the palantir.conf manual page or the relevant FAQ item for details.
A bug which allowed a malicious client to crash the server has been fixed. Although this did not represent a security hole in any way for the system running the server, everyone running a publicly accessible server is urged to upgrade!
Other important features include proper handling of large frame sizes (exceeding 640x480) and the ability to individually choose the TCP ports for the video and audio streams.
As far as client-side software is concerned, thanks to the great work of Daniele Lavatelli we're glad to announce the long-awaited release of the first native, Qt-based Linux client. Although some features are still lacking (audio channel, control capabilities), it already includes extra functionalities not found in its Windows counterpart (for example, a multi-panel interface to simultaneously display video from multiple servers).
The Palantir client for Windows v2.3.2 now available implements the latest version of the protocol, required to interoperate with the latest version of the server.
Moreover, the Java client has been greatly enhanced, especially with regards to device control functions.
Tim Niemuller created RPM packages for the Palantir server and clients. See the download page for links. Well done Tim!
Thanks to Tieffesistemi, a software and consulting firm located in Milan, Italy, a new demo location is now available.

4 Feb 2004

The Palantir server v2.5.4 is available.
The most important change is a bugfix preventing a malformed control string sent by a malicious client from crashing the server (as reported by paul at msunix dot co dot uk). Please upgrade at your earliest convenience!
A workaround has been implemented for some camera drivers (W996[87]CF, CPiA) reluctant to infer the capture depth from the requested palette.
A new configuration file parameter, ClientAckTimeout, specifies how long the server should wait for frame acknowledgement from stand-alone clients. The default is now 30 seconds (it was 15 in pre-2.5.4 versions).
Three new values for the "Visual" parameter - Slider_X, Slider_Y, Slider_Y - allow explicit assignment of a control to one of the sliders on the client's main window, which used to be reserved for pan, tilt and zoom controls.
The Palantir client for Windows v2.3.1 is now able to display the numerical value associated to these sliders as well, by selecting the "xyz readings" item from the "Display" menu.
Last but not least, thanks to Matt Pope a new demo location is available, with a beautiful view from Salt Lake City. Check the Demo page for details.

31 Oct 2003

Precompiled binaries of the Palantir server for Linux/PowerPC are now available!

21 Sep 2003

The Palantir server v2.5.3 is available.
The audio capture device is now selectable via the command-line option "-a" and the new config file option AudioCaptureDevice (the default is /dev/dsp). If the device has a fixed sample rate, Palantir attempts to downsample the audio stream to fit the GSM compressor requirements.
The server is now more robust with respect to audio failures: if the subsystem cannot be properly initialized, the server no longer aborts - the audio channel is simply disabled.
Extra checks are performed on the URLs requested by clients, to avoid starting the capture engine on bogus requests such as "/robots.txt".

22 Aug 2003

The Palantir server v2.5.2 is available.
Two new config file directives, VideoAudioInput and VideoAudioVolume, allow selection of the audio input device on the capture card (for those video cards featuring one or more audio sources, like TV or radio tuners) and its volume adjustment.
Another new feature is the ability to apply simple filters to the captured frames. Currently supported filters are Flip (mirrors the image horizontally), Invert (reverse the image vertically), and UpsideDown (equivalent to Flip Invert; useful if your camera is mounted rotated 180 degrees).
The Palantir client for Windows v2.3 is available, supporting configuration via the classic .ini file mechanism.

3 May 2003

The Palantir server v2.5.1 is available.
Additional HTTP headers prevent Mozilla from trying to cache the live stream (although the file was deleted upon disconnection from the server, it ate up an increasing amount of disk space during display).
The source code for the GSM library is now included with the Palantir source package and is automatically built when compiling the server. This ensures that the server is linked against a library built with the right compile-time options to properly interoperate with the Windows client.

6 Apr 2003

The Palantir server v2.5 is available.
Multi-buffered capture via mmap() is now implemented when supported by the video capture driver (e.g. bttv), providing a huge frame rate increase.
A new "performance measurement mode", in which the server runs a tight capture-only loop and no clients are served, can be requested via the -P command-line option.
Other minor bugfixes have been scattered everywhere.

8 Feb 2003

The Palantir server v2.4.1 is available.
It features two new configuration directives: Audio to enable or disable the audio channel (enabled by default), and VideoNorm to set the correct TV video norm for your country (PAL, SECAM, NTSC; default is PAL, so if the pictures you capture look corrupted in some strange ways try changing this setting).

A mailing list for the Palantir project is now active at SourceForge.

7 Feb 2003

Added the FAQ section.

9 Jan 2003

The whole Palantir system is now open source!
Download the source code or a precompiled (i386) binary package.

The Palantir server v2.4 is available.
Video and serial devices must be specified with their full path (e.g. /dev/video 0, /dev/ttyS1).
Named pipe path must now be explicitly specified in the config, or no pipe is used (as in the serial port case).
Many minor bugfixes and some cleanup.
A working (although incomplete) Java client is included in the freely downloadable distribution.
The Palantir client for Windows v2.2.1 is also available.

29 Aug 2002

The Palantir server v2.3.1 is available.
A bug has been fixed which caused the server to overestimate the number of connected clients if, under heavy load, no more threads could be created to serve new connections.
Besides, the default notifier for devices on the Internal link is now Client, so it is no longer necessary to explicitly state it in the configuration file.

21 Aug 2002

A new Palantir demo installation is online!
It is located at the amateur radio station in the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum computer museum.
Check the Demo page for details.

12 Aug 2002

The Palantir server v2.3 is available.
Several major changes: the capture thread wake-up delay upon client connections has been eliminated, making the system really snappy (this can be especially appreciated on a LAN).
In order to reduce bandwidth usage, the number of simultaneous connections to the video stream can now be limited via the new MaxStreamingClients configuration directive. Clients in excess to this limit are served a snapshot.
The system log can now be written to a file, specified by the new LogFile configuration directive. To allow log rotation, this file is closed and reopened when the server gets a HUP signal. Device names and hints are now properly %-encoded before they are sent to clients.

12 Aug 2002

The Palantir client for Windows v2.2 is available.
Many new features: full %-decoding of all text received from the server and an improved positioning of the devices form on the desktop. Besides, the "audio" channel selector is now enabled only if the server provides an audio channel, and the "Control" button is enabled only if the server provides an audio channel or has writable devices connected to it.
The new "Servers" menu makes it possible to quickly choose among multiple servers.
A guide to the client is now available on this website.

24 Jul 2002

The Palantir server v2.2.1 is available.
It features a cleaner handling of user-input text (which requires the Windows client to be upgraded to version 2.1).

24 Jul 2002

The Palantir client for Windows v2.1 is available.
It features a partial rewrite of the audio subsystem to manage suboptimal setups (e.g. half-duplex audio cards), support for the revised text transmission protocol implemented in version 2.2.1 of the server, and a few cosmetic changes.
The executable is now distributed in the UPX packed format, which requires no manual unzipping and results in a 25% better compression ratio than Zip.

12 Jul 2002

The Palantir client for Windows v2.0.1 is available.
It fixes a bug which prevented audio TCP connections to be made to ports other than 3001.

12 Jul 2002

The Palantir site is online.

5 Jul 2002

The Palantir server v2.2 is available.
Writing to the devices is now as fully (and coherently) supported as reading from them.
The palantir.conf configuration file is now completely documented in its own manual page (an HTML version is available here).

5 Jul 2002

The Palantir client for Windows v2.0 is available.
Connection attempts to unresponsive servers are now interruptible, and timeouts in the connection phase are handled gracefully.
The pan/tilt/zoom sliders are now only shown if the corresponding devices are declared in the server configuration file.