If you use Vodafone's UMTS service in Germany, you have probably noticed that JPEG images are compressed in low-quality mode. This is done by a transparent HTTP proxy, and there is no obvious way around it. Apart from very poor image quality, you might see messages about IP address 1.2.3.4 in your browser's status bar, and pop-ups advising you to press Ctrl+F5 to improve image quality.


2x magnified original and re-compressed JPEG image

The software that does this is provided by Bytemobile, and is used by other phone companies.

For MS Windows, the Vodafone HighPerformance Client apparently allows you to change the compression settings, but if you use Linux, you are on your own.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to convince the Bytemobile proxy to stop messing around with your images. All that is needed is contained in a small Perl script, which sends a magic byte sequence to the proxy. As long as the script is running, compression is turned off.

The magic bytes should be the same as the ones sent by the HighPerformance Client, but use the script at your own risk.

17:39, 05 Jan 2007 by Carsten Clasohm Permalink

Comments

Firefox solution

Using Firefox and the grease monkey plugin it is possible to write a simple javescript to reload the higher quality images.

http://www.thepointof.me.uk/index.php?/archives/2-Fix-for-Compressed-Vodafone-Images.html

by Anonymous Visitor, 16 May 2007

MANY-MANY THANKS!!!

I'm sorry for the capitals above but the things above helped me a lot, after 2 weeks' insomnia just because of this stupid compression stuff!!! A tried both (Greasemonkey and Perl-script) on Win32 and they work perfectly.
Thanks again!

&rew, Hungary

by Anonymous Visitor, 02 Jul 2007

thank you

your script seems to work under Mac OS X, too

by Anonymous Visitor, 03 Feb 2008

Thanks! Helps also on Windows!

Thanks for the great solution. Even on Windows this helps me alot: the "High Performance Client" is very buggy, it kills Cygwin etc. (for example "rsync" fails after installing the client, even for a local sync without network access. So I had  to uninstall it again - now I'm using the perl script and all works well.

Thanks,
Uwe

by Anonymous Visitor, 23 May 2008

So it's not a Virus...

Thanks, I saw 1.2.3.4 in my network analyser and thought it might be a security problem. Ping, dig, nslookup, etc didn't help much. Thanks for the reassurance.

(I'd noticed this image thing but never got round to really investigating. I happens in France for sure and, from memory, Spain too.)

by Anonymous Visitor, 01 Jul 2008

AT&T U.S.

AT&T Sierra Wireless MC8775 UMTS USB ...
New Dell system: pixellated web images...
First, I thought I had a Firefox prob -- then an operating system prob, then looked-up this "bmctl.exe" I found in taskmgr. I've run AT&T Connection Manager for a year on Vista and never saw this ... I wonder if this is something new that AT&T pushed to me ???
I just renamed all the bm*.exe files -- Seems to be ok now.

by Anonymous Visitor, 12 Oct 2008

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