Helioviewer now supports opening helioviewer.org movies in JHelioviewer!

Background

This feature is enabled by SAMP, a standard by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. SAMP is a protocol that allows different applications to send messages to each other. When JHelioviewer is running, it acts as a SAMP Hub and accepts requests to load images specified in the SAMP message.

Helioviewer can communicate with JHelioviewer thanks to sampjs, a JavaScript library which implements the SAMP protocol, and a library we developed called jhvrequest which provides a JavaScript interface for sending datasets to JHelioviewer.

Technically speaking, the mp4 itself is not sent to JHelioviewer. Instead, the list of the layers in the movie and the movie’s timespan are sent to Jhelioviewer so that it can reconstruct the movie.

Limitations

Currently movies containing XRT layers are not supported.

How To?

To open a movie in JHelioviewer, first have JHelioviewer running, then open one of your movies in helioviewer.org.

In the bottom right of the movie player window you will see an “Open in JHelioviewer” button.

If JHelioviewer is not running, the button will say “JHV is not open”, and the button will not be clickable. Make sure to open JHelioviewer first.

When you click the button, JHelioviewer will display a notification asking if you’d like to accept the incoming request.

Click Yes to load the movie in JHelioviewer.