I\'m proud to present the first alpha release of the \"CATS BURP\" utility.
CATS BURP is the Compact Automated Transfer System for BURP and will help artists and quality freaks to easily download the raw graphical output from sessions rendered on BURP for further processing or viewing. With this tool you can start downloading completed frames as soon as the session has started (no need to wait until it finishes).

CATS (for short) has been developed using Java and should work with pretty much any Java enabled platform with a recent installation of the SUN Java Runtime Environment.

This release has some limitations due to the fact that it is still an alpha version. You may download it from here (some Java platforms even allow you to run it online without storing it permanently on your harddrive):

Click to get CATS

Please note that CATS places a persistant cookie in your home directory called \"cats.cfg\" storing your configuration - including window positions, sessions being downloaded etc. This cookie does not store any confidential information (such as usernames, passwords or similar) but is merely there for convenience.

On systems that support it CATS will install itself as a tray application allowing it to run in the background even when the main window has been closed. To exit the application hit \"Exit\" in the tray or main window menu. To re-display the main window hit \"Display CATS\" in the tray popup (or double-clikc the cat-like icon).

If you have any issues, suggestions or ideas please post them here.

[edit:] Fixed support for downloading sessions that are in progress. Previously caused exceptions when selecting the session to be downloaded. Now also displays the render progress in parentheses.

Please note that the tool fetches the render output directly from the render storage system. This has a few implications:

• You will be fetching files directly from the main server which is on a limited network connection
  
• The combined filesize is much higher than when simply downloading a compressed movie-file.
  

With this in mind feel free to download as much as you like.

whenever I start CATS, the message box just sits on the screen and doesn\'t do anything. It says that it is loading configuration, but I left the computer alone for an hour and it still says that.

same here.

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Contribution to BURP total: 0.5% (manually updated)

Oh, sorry about that. Try re-downlading.
At least you got to enjoy the nice little splash-screen then, hehe.

[Edit: ] When no .cfg file was present CATS tried to run a portion of the code that would generate a proper default .cfg, however this code made an uncaught exception which caused the program to stall.
The initial load-phase should take only a few seconds in total.[/edit]

Might display my lack of technical ability, but can you give me some instructions on how to get the app running.

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@havoc, simply run the jar file through a JAVA vm. on windows with a proper java runtime installation, you can simply click on the .jar file to run it.

@janus: works fine for me. I\'ve already successfully downloaded a few frames. But there is a couple of things you might want to look into:
changing user ID on the fly does not work, after putting in a new id, i have to restart the app to load the new sessions for that user.
by default, on WinXP, it saves the frame to %userhome%\\burp\\ it would be a lot better to save the images to %userhome%\\My Document\\burp.

and of course, the ability to search by user name as oppose to user id would be real nice :D

Thanks for all the effort you\'ve put into BURP!

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Contribution to BURP total: 0.5% (manually updated)

mpan3 wrote:

changing user ID on the fly does not work, after putting in a new id, i have to restart the app to load the new sessions for that user.

That\'s in the known issues :)

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My documents

I wonder if there\'s any way to
1) Detect that the JavaVM is running on Windows (other OS\'s don\'t have dedicated document folders like that)
2) Detect the name of the document directory (may be localized like \"Mine Dokumenter\" or something).
It is ment to save the previous path you used, this may not be the case?

and of course, the ability to search by user name as oppose to user id would be real nice :D

The problem is that usernames aren\'t unique. Possibly a drop-down box...

My documents

I wonder if there\'s any way to
1) Detect that the JavaVM is running on Windows (other OS\'s don\'t have dedicated document folders like that)
2) Detect the name of the document directory (may be localized like \"Mine Dokumenter\" or something).
It is ment to save the previous path you used, this may not be the case?[/url]

Why only Windows? On Unixes it would give your $HOME.

and of course, the ability to search by user name as oppose to user id would be real nice :D

The problem is that usernames aren\'t unique. Possibly a drop-down box...

Email addresses are unique.

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Why only Windows? On Unixes it would give your $HOME.

That\'s what it does already, but on Windows $HOME is one step up (in the directory tree) from \"My Documents\".

Email addresses are unique.

Hm yeah.

I think the default for the \"location to download the session data to\" is not nice.
I have move the My Documents folder to a different location.
I get now as default path the profile location + burp, which it should be \"My Documents\" + burp
(BTW the slashes are strange we start with \\ and end with /)

(BTW the slashes are strange we start with \\ and end with /)

Noted, and added to \"Known Problems\".

I\'ve just download CATS
* the user Id is confusing why not, just the user name (like Janus or PovAddict, etc)
and the list disappears before i can click on any thing to download

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* the user Id is confusing why not, just the user name (like Janus or PovAddict, etc)

That\'s not unique, more than one user can have the same name. It\'s just a name to show in stats and forums, not a \"username\".

Email address, however, is unique and would be less confusing than the numeric userID.

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and the list disappears before i can click on any thing to download

If you entered your own userid then there are no sessions to monitor since you didn\'t upload any - that would produce an empty list.

Emails

You wouldn\'t know the email of another user. The tools allows you to monitor other users than yourself.

There is a solution to this problem: allow search by username and by ID. If ID is entered, behave like it is now, if username is entered, check if it is unique. If it is, we\'re good, else complain and ask for ID. This is how I am implementing private message functionality in BOINC forum.

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PrimeGrid
Administrator