IOXperts Webcam/IIDC 1.1b29 Available

[Steve Sisak]

At 8:39 PM +0100 1/19/04, Manfred Schubert wrote:
>You are right, removing the old receipt allowed the Installer to run 
>without error message. The video settings dialog and Camera Control 
>app say driver version is 1.1b27 so I don't know whether it 
>succeeded though.

Mine say 1.1b29, so you might have an old version still on your machine.

You might also try rebooting -- I'm not entirely convinced that the 
Mac OS X Component Manager notices when a disk-based component has 
been replaced.

If you're still seeing an old version try removing any IOXperts files 
from /Library/Components and deleting everything but the Device Keys 
directory from /Library/Application Support/IOXperts/ then reinstall.

I've also had a case where the video application crashed opening the 
Video Settings dialog that was cleared by rebooting -- presumably 
because I'd deleted the code of a component when I replaced a driver.

(I don't think this will affect end users, but I thought I'd mention 
it in case it shows up during testing)

Note that with 1.1, we're installing our SGPanel Component in a 
separate file (IOXperts Video Support.component) in 
/Library/Components/ from the Video Digitizer component -- we may add 
codecs and other shared components to this file as well.

Prior to 1.1 we put both in the same file, meaning that if you had 
more than one video digitizer installed, you also had duplicate 
copies of the SGPanel -- I have a suspicion that this was causing 
crashes with multiple cameras and in any case, it was wasting address 
space.

Supporting multiple cameras simultaneously on X is messy because 
Mach-O's ABI can't support per-context globals for bundles loaded 
within a single process the way the native PowerPC ABI (used by CFM) 
does -- instead, it uses PC-relative addressing (on a processor with 
no PC-relative addressing mode).

Since some of the chip vendor supplied use state globals between 
calls, the only way to support multiple cameras simultaneously is to 
duplicate the code of the video digitizer for each driver installed 
and chance the Bundle ID so that both are loaded -- this wastes 
address space increases cache misses bacause we can't share the code, 
but it's all Mach-O allows.

(At some point, I may look at moving the decompression code to a CFM 
bundle as it is possible to have independent globals for each 
instance and still share the code under CFM -- we might pick up some 
performance as well, be I want to get shipping first)

>Would it be possible to just install the control app directly into 
>Applications without enclosing folder?

It's certainly possible -- I'd like to see what others have to say.

(At some point, we may have additional applications and some users 
complain about us cluttering /Applications)

>Would be nice to be able to open the app directly without having to 
>step into that folder, open the app then going out of that folder 
>again.

HTH,

-Steve
-- 
_________________________________________________________________________
Steve Sisak, CTO                                 steve.sisak at ioxperts.com
IOXperts, Inc.                                     voice: +1 617 876-2572
87 Bristol St #3A                                    fax: +1 617 876-2337
Cambridge, MA 02139                               mobile: +1 617 388-6476