I hate to seem always to be bringing up problems, but . . .

It seems all the panoramas I do suffer from jerkiness. Even when they seem to have completely loaded I can't do a full pan without it stuttering and jerking and seeing ripples.

For example, here is a test panorama (ignore the absolutely awful photography and poor focus - it's just a test !!!):
http://www.multimediaaction.com/pantest-2/lib.html
Not only is the thing constantly loading as you pan around (can't it just preload everything in the background !?), but even after that it simply won't smoothly do a 360-degree pan no matter how slow you go. It's very poor.

Even in this example pano on KR it suffers from this:
http://krpano.com/krpano.html?pano=panos…leiongarten.xml

But here is a FPP panorama which (when loaded) is absolutely silky smooth even at top rotation speed:
http://www.vrwebdesign.co.uk/nhmflashtour/index.htm

Why ? What do I need to do to make my panoramas pan absolutely smooth ?

Fast quadcore with 4Gb RAM and a 512Mb video card . . . I do video editing on this machine. But I see this panorama stuttering on all my computers.

Maybe I'm just fussy ?

Thanks for the preload info Klaus.

As for the framerate, I experimented with various rates, but opted for the lower value since if you choose to autorotate, a higher framerate chews up an amazing amount of CPU. Going from 60 to 30 more than halved the CPU hit yet I couldn't notice much of a difference in the display - and it didn't make any difference to the "stutters". I even tried upping to 90fps, but no effect.

I've tested on FF3 & IE7 and on four machines ranging from a severely underpowered netbook to my video-editing quadcore, all with the same result. Yet others report totally smooth pans, and some have problems like mine ?! I don't understand.

@VN2009: Load times is something else again. I think my host server (based in Sydney) needs investigation. Thanks for the report.

I enabled "use smooth scrolling" in Firefox and that seems to have massively reduced the problem. But that's not turned on in the default installation so far as I know. There's no point in optimizing your own machine so the panoramas look nice - it's what everyone else sees that counts . . .

( And IE7 is still terrible ).

I wonder if calling in some extra javascript smooth scrolling code in the xml would help ?

If I turn off Flash 10 then I start seeing wavy lines and ripples in straight edges. So I'm stuck with 10 for now.

Turning on "smooth scrolling" in FireFox helps a lot, but again it's *wrong, wrong, wrong* to make changes on your own machine to get a good display ! It must look good on unmodified user machines.

Gaydon: Good idea using this as a reference:
http://krpano.com/108beta/flash10_example.html

I'm testing all panos on three machines: high power quad; older "net surfer" 3GHz P4; and a low-power netbook. IE7 displays jerky (from terrible to passable) on all of them. Firefox is generally much better.

IE7 is a notoriously bad browser, but it is also the world's most common browser.

I'd like to see a baseline "test pano" on KR with a realistic "natural viewing" mousespeed (instead of crazy fast) and viewers to vote on whether they see it smooth or not. I think there's a problem, but would be very happy to be proved utterly wrong.

Klaus, do you think there's any issue here at all, or is it just a matter of tweaking parameters ?

Thanks for the ideas Klaus.

I have added the options panel to my test pano. I've also upped the ramerate to 60fps and turned off autorotate and lowered the Flash 10 move quality to low.

Th results while slowly panning in IE7 on the three machines are confusing:

- The quadcore reports pretty steady framerate while panning in the 50-60 range. Displayed in a reasonably sized window the CPU barely gets off 1%. Displayed full screen on my 1920x1200 display on full "right button" rotation, all four cores run at about 60%.
- If I hold down the "lright button" key I get very regular "hestitations" every 90 to 120 degrees

- The P4 framerate while panning drops to only about 10fps ! (both IE & FF) The CPU is at 100%. Since it is now so slow the entire thing moves in litle jumps, but no "kerks". This machine is running dual 17-inch lcds off a Matrox 550, so not a great card, but probably not that different to many potential viewers.

- The netbook (MSI Wind) while panning manages a pretty constant 30 - 45 fps. The CPU is 60 - 80%. It too gets regular hesitations, but probably not as bad as the quadcore. All up it is probably the best !

(The jerky effect is almost like watching a video online at the edge of buffering: momentary tiny stops and starts)

What does it all mean ? Of course all I'm trying to do is code the panos so they look smooth on an average viewer's machine. Bad pan = no business for me.