10.3.4 precluding successful use of cameras, me too (fire-i, firewire, 2 cameras, no joy)

[Hank Roberts]

I lost use of the pair of Unibrain Fire-i cameras (I'd been using two
simultaneously, with EvoCam v3, to do stereo movies).   They'd become
flaky with 10.3.2, I'd had to go back to the stock Apple drivers that give
very fuzzy images, because the IOXperts drivers could handle one or the
other camera but always go to black if I tried both at the same time.

My guess is Apple really hasn't figured out how to implement firewire yet,
and the IOXperts people aren't going to be able to get their driver
working until and if Apple sorts it out.

I've discovered that if I use a Windows machine, these same firewire
cameras offer a great range of user settings -- several levels of
backlighting options, for example -- and can do quite a lot.  Ben Bird's
firewire software can get at and set some of those settings, temporarily,
but doesn't seem to save them; Evological's analyzer software (I've
forgotten the name) also can show and set some of the other oaptions on
one of these cameras at a time but not on both of them, and can't save
them.

Could this be because there's only a single firewire bus, internally, in
the Powerbook (at least) despite having two ports or three if you cound
the pcmcia card slot?  It all goes into a signle internal channel, and
maybe there's no way inside to keep the signals sorted out?  Just
guessing.

Well, even though they don't work reliably, Apple sure makes _pretty_
boxes.