Pilips Vesta issues (was: IOXperts Video 1.1b45 posted

[Steve Sisak]

At 10:55 PM +0000 2/9/05, Barney Hilken wrote:
>I have two cameras: a Philips ToUCam Fun, and a Philips Vesta Pro. 
>They are connected to different USB channels.
>
>The ToUCam works fine in iChat, iMovie and BTV.
>
>The Vesta doesn't work at all. If both cameras are connected, the 
>Vesta produces coloured noise.

OK -- I'll check that -- there may be a problem if you have 2 Philips 
cameras connected that are not set to the same video size.

The reason is that there are global variables in the decoder code we 
got were provided by Philips and Apple's "modern" Mach-O architecture 
does not support per-context globals for multiple instances of a 
library loaded in the same process. (This was no problem with CFM 
under Mac OS 9 as each device got its own instance of the driver)

I thought I fixed this in a way that two instance of the driver at 
different settings would only be slow, but will check further.

>If I unplug the ToUCam, the Vesta shows only the top left portion of 
>its image, expanded to fit the window. It doesn't matter which 
>camera is plugged into which USB card, the behaviour is just the 
>same.

At least it's consistent. :-)

Actually, this sounds like an application bug -- the driver is 
probably returning a 640x480 image and the application is not scaling 
it as the Sequence Grabber would.

>Barney.
>
>P.S. Is there any way to tell iMovie which camera to use? It always 
>picks the Vesta.

No idea, but there are a lot of applications that can't fathom the 
idea that you might have more than one camera attached to your 
computer. (Chough. Yahoo Instant Messenger)

At 11:04 PM +0000 2/9/05, Barney Hilken wrote:
>Continuing my report on the two Philips cameras, the light on the 
>ToUCam goes off after wake from deep sleep, but the light on the 
>Vesta stays on. I think the same happened after a restart.

Did the old version turn the light off?

This may or may not be a bug depending on how old your Vest is -- the 
very first ones could not be put into low-power mode.

Or it may be a bug where we're only putting the 1st camera into low power mode.

In any case, when you connect a Philips camera, it's in high power 
mode -- our daemon puts it to sleep if possible and the driver wakes 
it up as needed.

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