IOXperts Webcam/IIDC 1.1b29 Available

[Steve Sisak]

At 6:49 PM +0000 1/21/04, Barney Hilken wrote:
>I'm using iChat AV with iChatUSBcam, the IOXperts driver version 
>b29, and a Philips ToUCam fun. The video is very dark, so I want to 
>turn down the FPS (because that works in other apps). I thought this 
>was what IOXperts Camera Control was for, but I can't get it to 
>work. If I launch it before iChat, it complains, but if I launch it 
>after iChat, it bounces up and down indefinitely, and never opens a 
>window. Any possible fix?

It appears that the problem here is that the driver installs a 
handler for incoming Apple Events (to receive events from the camera 
control application) in the application's RunLoop -- this works for 
most applications since it's illegal to call QuickTime from anywhere 
other than the main thread.

Unfortunately, it appears that iChat is starving the main event loop 
for time when a conference is running and the Apple Event receiver 
never gets any CPU time to respond. We need to do some profiling and 
possibly look into moving the receiver to a separate thread.

On a related note, someone (off list) pointed out that the Camera 
Control application does not support multiple cameras -- we need to 
open it up and fix this, which will require revisiting the same code.

I'd be interested in UI ideas for Camera Control.

I consider it a bug that it won't launch until a video application is 
running (sorry) -- it should present a list of any open video streams 
and allow you to choose which one to control.

One obvious implementation is to provide a pop-up to select which 
stream to control, which doesn't increase the amount of screen real 
estate and scales well - it can just be disabled when there are not 
streams.

The disadvantage is that you can only control one stream at a time.

Another would be to have a window per stream -- this uses more screen 
space and might have a more complicated UI.

Because these items will require code changes and a bit of thought to 
get right, I'm thinking we want to hold both of these until 1.1.1 so 
we can ship 1.1 and get some more user feedback.

-Steve
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_________________________________________________________________________
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