Snow leopard Support?

[Steve Sisak]

Hi Ignacio,

Thanks for writing -- I'll try to give you a detailed answer here, 
although it's probably not the one you want to hear :-(, I'm hoping 
it's useful and will help others.

At 8:46 PM +0900 2/15/10, Guillermo Enriquez wrote:
>I downloaded IOXperts Webcam Driver 1.2 for Mac OS X -- BETA
>and Installed in my MacOS 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)
>And Apple applications like iChat works very well but, when I try to 
>run some code I got only black and white frames, so no color.

 From your description, I'm guessing that your camera is an IIDC 
FireWire camera that does Bayer color -- if this is the case, the 
black and white image probably has a slight "screen door" effect. 
This is from the Bayer Image, which looks like this:

   RGRGRGRG
   GBGBGBGB
   RGRGRGRG
   GBGBGBGB

Being displayed as black and white.

As far as we know, 1.2 works fine on Snow Leopard -- the problem is 
that as of Snow Leopard if you use the "new" QuickTime APIs and one 
of Apple's drivers thinks it supports your camera, the Apple driver 
will be used in preference to any 3rd party drivers.

Also, the "iApps" (iChat, iPhoto, etc.) are hard-coded to not show 
video from 3rd party drivers (unless you use a 3rd party patch like 
iUSBCam <http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iusbcam/> to get around that 
restriction).

I suspect the problem here is that Apple's driver doesn't support 
Bayer color and (incorrectly) displays it as grayscale, but since 
Apple's driver thinks it supports the camera, if you use the "new" 
QTKit APIs to capture video, you will always get the Apple driver 
(and a black and white image).

If you're writing your own code and use the (old) Sequence Grabber 
(or VDIG) API, you will see both our drivers and Apple's as separate 
inputs and can choose freely between them.

Unfortunately, 3rd party driver developers cannot ship drivers based 
on the new API (this has been the case for several years) and the new 
API and many applications on them, do not provide a means for 
switching between drivers for the same device.

Hopefully you can see the difficult position we're in.

At the moment, the only way to reliably support 3rd party drivers is 
to use the old API -- hopefully this will change, but the issue is 
entirely in Apple's hands. This should also explain why we haven't 
been doing many driver updates.

I'm open to suggestions on how we can best serve our customers here.

At the moment, the options I can see are:

1) Wait for Apple to allow 3rd parties to ship QTKit drivers
2) Encourage people to use the old API
3) Develop a new video input API that isn't dependent on QuickTime 
(and convince Application developers to use it)

Other suggestions would be welcome here.

Quick answers to the rest of your questions:

>I wonder if this is a restriction of the trial version?( I think 
>this because when i try ichat there is no trial alert or serial code 
>input alert, but there is one when I run programs from code. )

If you don't get a trial alert, then that's a good indication you're 
getting the Apple driver instead of ours.

>Or maybe is just a bug?
>Or maybe I got the incorrect drivers?

See above. :-(

>Does anybody is actually getting the drivers to work well in Snow Leopard?

If you have an application the uses the (old) Sequence Grabber API, 
is should work. For a test, you can grab a copy of Hack TV (a test 
application) from our website here:

<http://www.ioxperts.com/downloads/Utilities/HackTV%20Universal.zip>

You should see both drivers in the video input dialog.

>I have tried with QTRecorder sample program and OpenCV and I have 
>the results are the same.
>( 
>http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/QTRecorder/QTRecorder.zip 
>)
>
>I hope this is a restriction.

It's not -- with the exception of the time limit, the trial version 
_is_ the full version (as in the same code).

HTH,

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