Checking, no rush, on my open questions

[Steve Sisak (Support)]

Hi Hank,

At 11:50 AM -0700 9/6/04, Hank Roberts wrote:
>I'm just checking because I haven't seen anything from the list in a 
>while, due to my own other distractions.

No problem -- we've had a few distractions here as well. :-/

In any case, your timing is good as we're finally about ready to get 
a new release out which may work a lot better for you.

I'm sorry this took so long, but it appears the root cause is that 
when we added support for remote control was added, the author of the 
code did it in a way that broke as soon as you opened a second copy 
of the driver in the same process.

As a result of that and a few other problems, I've had to hold the 
release until that code could be rewritten -- unfortunately, this 
also required redesign of the communication between the driver and 
daemon and a bunch of other stuff.

On top of that, I had to do a little consulting to pay the bills and 
support has consumed a lot of our time.

BTW-We're about to launch a new support forum and redirect most 
questions there so that the answers are public and we don't have to 
keep reansweing the same questions -- if you (or anyone on the list) 
have a moment, please take a look at <http://forums.ioxperts.com> and 
feel free to post generally useful questions there.

>I'm continuing to try making short stereo movies using two firewire 
>cameras -- the two samples made under older OSX when things worked 
>better are still available
>  http://www.ankh.members.sonic.net
>  each under 1 meg, for "parallel view"
>
>My open questions remain, here's all I know about them:
>
>Driver betas:  I at the moment have removed all the IOX files (is 
>there a complete list of what to uninstall and how?).  I still get 
>crashes with EvoCam with Apple's drivers.

With the exception of files that are required by the OS to be in 
special places by the OS, all of our files live in 
"/Library/Application Support/IOXperts/".

The serial number files live in "/Library/Application 
Support/IOXperts/Device Keys/" and are plain text files whose name is 
related to the product uniqueID and contain your serial number. You 
might want to preserve the contents of directory if you are doing a 
clean install.

The Quicktime components live in /Library/Components

There is one for each camera you've installed plus "IOXperts Video 
Support.component" which contains shared components like the sequence 
grabber panels and codecs.

The reason you need to reinstall for each camera is a "feature" of 
Mach-O where you can't load 2 copies of a bundle into the same 
process without them clobbering each other's global variables. (On 
CFM this is no problem)

Rather that using the PPC register dedicate to accessing global date 
(R2/RTOC) Mach-O uses PC-relative addressing meaning that to have 2 
drivers coexist in the same process, the installer has to duplicate 
the code of the driver and give it a different bundle ID so that they 
won't step on each other.

>Stereo movies in EvoCam:
>      Evological has a new beta of EvoCam out, links through 
>evological.com -- it works better, more choices and settings.
>
>Unibrain cameras:
>   Their support (finally) told me their  "fire-i" camera settings 
>last only as long as the application changing them is open. 
>Unibrain makes a Windows app that supposedly saves and reloads 
>settings, but again the settings are lost when that app closes.  No 
>other app can save settings and reapply them.

Quicktime assumes that an application is responsible for 
saving/restoring its own settings -- there are 2 calls for it, the 
app just has to call them.

I've been thinking of adding code to the driver to do this behind the 
back of lazy applications, but this will require a rather complex 
control panel for the driver.

>Apple IIDC bug:
>   Several people have told me there's a problem with IIDC cameras 
>when two are used at the same time -- one of them will eventually go 
>magenta-blurry and quit updating.  I see this happen a lot, and can 
>only get a few minutes of stereo movie recorded before one camera 
>quits updating.

I've never seen this, but would believe it.

>Apple IIDC throughput limit:
>   I did find an Apple tech note saying the total throughput is about 
>80 percent of the 400 bps for the single internal bus and adding 
>another bus using a PCI card is the only way to increase it -- not 
>possible for me with my Powerbook G3 Pismo.

You should be able to run 2 cameras at the same time with no problem. 
All of the cheaper cameras (Pyro, iBot, etc.) can only use half of 
the bus. I've run 3 on our drivers (under Mac OS 9) with a little 
attention to the video size.

>   Has anyone any guidance for what settings make what sort of 
>difference in throughput?  I'd appreciate any help, I don't really 
>know where in the process any of the compression, shutter speed or 
>other settings occur.  I can imagine that the two fire-i cameras 
>simply run full bore no matter what compression is set, but I would 
>guess the settings that are available using BTVPro or EvoCam 
>(shutter speed, brightness, sharpness) are being made in the cameras 
>and might change how much of a signal I get through the bus.

You are correct that 2 cameras should go full bore -- not sure how 
the applications handle per-camera settings.

In general we try to expose all of the camera features to the 
application and let them figure out what to do with it, but I'm 
beginning to think we need to do more behind their backs because some 
of the developers (Yahoo) don't care.

Cheers,

-Steve

-- 
_________________________________________________________________________
Steve Sisak, CTO                                 steve.sisak at ioxperts.com
IOXperts, Inc.                                            +1 617 876-2572